Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

58 Kristin Bech
it provides information on the relationship between the coordinate clause and the
preceding clause. As regards the word order of clauses with initial therefore, it is not
the case that therefore is obligatorily followed by the verb: in OE it is sometimes
followed by the verb and sometimes by the subject, often depending on whether
the subject is nominal or pronominal. The same pattern is found in ME. In other
words, although the language is changing into a verb-medial language, verb-second
(XVS) order is still possible in some contexts. It is thus conceivable that the process
by which XVS word order largely becomes restricted to existential clauses first happens
in non-coordinate clauses, and that it takes a little longer in coordinate clauses.
The reason is that the function of coordinate clauses entails that an adverb such as
therefore will occur naturally in the initial X position, and that the clauses in which
they occur sometimes have verb-second word order, on the pattern of OE.
3.2 Verbs with complement in the XVS pattern
Tables 2–5 also show the distribution of verbs with complement in the XVS
pattern. In OE the proportion of verbs with complement is greater in the XVS
non-coordinate clause pattern than in the coordinate clause pattern; 8 in early ME
the proportions are equal in the two clause types, and in late ME the XVS coordinate
clause category has a significantly higher proportion of verbs with complement
than the non-coordinate clause category. In the OE period, XVS was still
a productive word order, and we would therefore expect to find this word order
used with different verb types. As we saw above, existential verbs account for only
around 20% of the verb types in the XVS non-coordinate clauses in the first three
periods.
A closer study of the XVS non-coordinate clauses reveals that in OE, a majority
(340 of 584, or 58.2%) of them have initial þa or þonne. The adverbial þa, in addition
to being an adverbial of time, may also imply sequence, that an event takes place
after another event. Enkvist (1972) suggests that þa is an ‘action marker’, and Pintzuk
(1995) calls clauses with initial þa ‘narrative advancing clauses’. (9) is an example
of a typical þa sequence:
(9) ƿa com se dæg þe se dema gesætte . and wæron gegeorcode þa reðan wyta .
and wurdon gefætte æt-foran þam deman . þa unscildigan cristenan … Đa cwæð .
philippus . mid fullum graman . to eugenian his agenre dehter ‘…’ Đa cwæð
eugenia . þæt …
Then came the day that the judge set, and were prepared the cruel tortures, and
were brought before the judge the innocent Christians … Then said Philip with
8. In early OE, the difference is not statistically significant on the 0.05 level (chi-square value
1.538, p ≈ 0.22), whereas the difference in late OE is significant.