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

62 Kristin Bech
additional information about time, place or manner. 2) In OE, both postverbal and
preverbal position were possible for the subject. As a result of this situation, subject
placement was partly determined by principles of information structure, to the effect
that if the subject occurred before the verb, it was often light and/or given, whereas
postverbal position could be filled by either light/given subjects or heavy and/or
new subjects, with existential clauses being a typical example of the latter. In XSV
clauses, then, the subject is usually given, and that, in combination with the likelihood
of the initial X element being an adverbial, often one relating to the previous
context, means that the verb would most likely be a verb with complement, because
otherwise the clause would be rather uninformative. Since sentences usually have
to contain some new, salient information, it is very likely that the given subject, the
agent, carries out an action, and that this action will affect someone or something,
which means that the verb will take a complement. The situation in late ME resembles
the earlier periods: the majority of the verbs in the XSV pattern are still verbs
with complement. Since English word order moved towards verb-medial syntax, we
would not expect the verb distribution in this pattern to alter dramatically. 12
3.4 Copulas in the SVX pattern
The last feature to be discussed is the higher proportion of copulas in non-coordinate
SVX clauses than in coordinate clauses in all but the last period. For late OE
and early ME, the distributional difference is statistically significant on the 0.05
level, whereas for early OE, p ≈ 0.11.
As mentioned, coordinate clauses are presumably closely related to the previous
clause or sentence, whereas non-coordinate clauses are more context independent.
Furthermore, a characteristic of SVX word order is that the X element(s) will in
most cases be heavy and/or new, in accordance with general pragmatic principles.
Finally, copular clauses are characterized by the fact that the main focus is on attributing
a quality to a subject, which means that the subject is likely to be known
and the attributed quality will constitute the new information. If we consider
these three factors together, it becomes clear why there is a greater proportion
of copular verbs in non-coordinate SVX clauses than in coordinate SVX clauses:
since the focus of a copular clause is on attributing a quality to a subject, and not
relating any action to the previous sentence, a copular clause is less likely to point
back to the previous sentence than to stand on its own, or function as a frame or
background for what follows, as exemplified in (12).
12. What we would expect, however, is an increase in heavy and/or new subjects in the XSV
pattern, since the loss of verb-second order meant that the option of choosing postverbal position
for heavy subjects disappeared, and that is in fact what happens: in late ME, the proportion
of nominal subjects in this pattern is much higher than in the earlier periods (Bech 2001: 97).