The loss of grammatical gender and case features between Old and Early Middle English: Its impact on simple demonstratives and topic shift
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Date
2017-12
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Abstract
In this paper we examine the relation between the loss of formal gender and Case features on
simple demonstratives and the topic shifting property they manifest. The examination period
spans between Old English and Early Middle English. While we argue that this loss has important
discourse-pragmatic and derivational effects on demonstratives, we also employ the Strong
Minimalist Hypothesis approach (Chomsky 2001) and feature valuation, as defined in Pesetsky
& Torrego (2007), to display how their syntactic computation and pragmatic properties have
come about. To account for the above innovations yielding the Early Middle English ϸe (‘the’),
we first discuss the formal properties of the Old English demonstratives which distinguish
number, gender, and Case features. This inflectional variety of forms allows the Old English
demonstratives to be used independently and to show the anaphoric and discourse-linking
properties of topics. Crucially, the same properties characterise also German and Dutch
demonstratives that manifest Case and/or gender morphology overtly, which shows that the
syntactic distribution of LIs and their morphological richness should be considered as intertwined.
The above properties are then confronted with the determiner system in Early Middle English,
whose forms undergo inflectional levelling producing the invariant ϸe/ðe form that loses its
distributional independence and acquires the article status. The levelling process in question is
argued to stimulate the shift of the [+ref/spec] feature from the formal to the semantic pole. This
suggests that the Early Middle English ϸe form no longer counts as an appropriate anaphor in
topic shift contexts owing to its indeterminacy of Case, gender, and φ-features, which means that
it cannot satisfy the Full Interpretation requirement at the interfaces.
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inflectional morphology, topic shift, the loss of formal gender and Case, OE/EME demonstratives
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 52.2(2017), pp.203-250