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

Verb types and word order 65
non-coordinate vs. coordinate clauses in relation to the pragmatic features of SVX
word order and the communicative function of copular clauses. It is likely that this
also applies to late ME, and to Modern English.
4. conclusion
In this paper I have attempted to show the relation between non-coordinate and coordinate
clauses, some verb types and word order in Old and Middle English. In spite
of certain problematic aspects, such as the question of different text types and their
possible idiosyncratic features, and a low number of tokens in some instances, some
conclusions may be attempted. Since there is a difference between non-coordinate
and coordinate clauses with respect to the distribution of certain verbs within some
of the word order patterns, we may assume that these two clause types have different
functions. Furthermore, since verbs say something about what kind of information
a sentence contains, and since there is a difference between the word order patterns
as regards the verb distribution, we may assume that a functional perspective on
word order is not irrelevant, i.e., word order is related to the information content of
the sentence. Lastly, the diachronic data show the development of the verb distribution
within the different word orders in non-coordinate and coordinate clauses. The
most conspicuous development takes place in the XVS pattern, and can be related to
the fact that English changed into a verb-medial language.
References
A. List of source material consulted
For Early Old English
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Bede, 250 clauses)
King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care (Cura, 250 clauses)
The Old English Orosius (Or, 500 clauses)
King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae (Bo, 250 clauses)
Tables 2–5, percentagewise. This means that the features I have discussed occur independently
of the number of clauses extracted from the texts. However, what did happen was that some of
the results were no longer statistically significant. For example, in my original data, the proportion
of copulas in early ME SVX non-coordinate and coordinate clauses was 34.2% and 22.8%,
respectively (cf. Table 4), and the chi-square test showed statistical significance on the 0.05 level.
In the ‘normalized’ data, the corresponding proportions were 32.8% and 21.6%, i.e., almost
identical to the original data, but the difference was no longer statistically significant (p ≈ 0.14).
This just illustrates that the smaller the corpus, the less certain the results.