Subjecthood and the English impersonal

Chapters in this book

1. I-XL I
2. I Language history. The history of English
3. Phonetics/Phonology
4. Phonaesthesia and other forms of word play 3
5. Middle English phonology without the syllable 13
6. Chaucerian phonemics: Evidence and interpretation 29
7. The hiatus in English historical phonology 59
8. Early Modern English vowel shortenings in monosyllables before dentals: A morphologically conditioned sound change? 65
9. The metrical prominence hierarchy in Old English verse 73
10. Morphology
11. The issue of double modals in the history of English revisited 87
12. The evolution of definite and indefinite articles in English 101
13. The morphology and dialect of Old English disyllabic nouns 113
14. The root of the matter: OE wyrt, wyrtwale, -a, wyrt(t)rum(a) and cognates 127
15. Nominal markedness changes in three Old and Middle English psalters — using the past to predict the past 143
16. The instrumental in Old English 153
17. Cumulative phenomena between prefixes and verbs in Old English 167
18. Morphological variation and change in Early Modern English: my/mine, thy/thine 179
19. The genitive and the category of case in the history of English 193
20. Weak-to-strong: A shift in English verbs? 215
21. Chaucer’s compound nouns: Patterns and productivity 229
22. Syntax
23. Subjecthood and the English impersonal 251
24. The grammaticalisation of infinitival to in English compared with German and Dutch 265
25. -THING in English: A case of grammaticalization? 281
26. Topics in Old and Middle English negative sentences 293
27. Topicalization in Old English and its effects. Some remarks 307
28. “Therfor speke playnly to the poynt”: Punctuation in Robert Keayne’s notes of church meetings from early Boston, New England 323
29. ME can and gan in context 343
30. Economy as a principle of syntactic change 357
31. Optional THAT with subordinators in Middle English 373
32. Relative clauses in Thomas Browne: On the way to standard syntax 385
33. Subject-oriented adverbs in a diachronic and contrastive perspective 395
34. The concept of the macrosyntagm in Early Modern English prison narratives 423
35. Object-verb word order in 16th century English: A study of its frequency and status 439
36. Lexis
37. Three etymological cruxes: Early Middle English cang ‘fool(ish)’ and (Early) Middle English cangun/conjoun ‘fool’, Middle English crois versus cross and Early Modern English clown 457
38. “With this ring I thee wed”: The verbs to wed and to marry in the history of English 467
39. The ‘Hard Words’ of Levins’ dictionary 483
40. From Jabberwocky back to Old English: Nonsense, Anglo-Saxon and Oxford 503
41. “To make merry”, its variants in Middle English, and the Helsinki Corpus 521
42. Translation as enrichment of language in sixteenth century England: The Courtyer (1561) by Sir Thomas Hoby 543
43. Re-examining the influence of Scandinavian on English: The case of ditch/dike 561
44. Forget-me-not - an English plant name of European lineage 571
45. Some East Anglian dialect words in the light of historical toponymy 585
46. Word-formation and the text in Early English: The axiological functions of Old English prefixes 593
47. Varieties, past and present
48. The battle at ‘Acleah’: A linguist’s reflection on annals 851 and 871 of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 605
49. What to call a name? Problems of “head-forms” for Old English personal names 615
50. Laʒamon’s idiolect 629
51. The influence of English upon Scottish writing 637
52. The dialects of Middle English 655
53. The Northern paradigm and its implications for scribal grammar in Þe Wohnunge of Ure Lauerd 665
54. Punctuation in the Middle English prose legend of St Faith in MS Southwell Minster 7 679
55. Derivation of it from Þat in eastern dialects of British English 691
56. Social embedding of linguistic changes in Tudor English 701
57. On the representation of English low vowels 719
58. The possessive adjective as involvement marker in colonial Virginia cookeries 739
59. British vernacular dialects in the formation of American English: The case of East Anglian do 749
60. On negation in dialectal English 759
61. General
62. English historical linguistics and philology in Japan 1950-1994: A survey with a list of publications arranged in chronological order 771
63. Knowledge of Old English in the Middle English period? 791
64. By Saint Tanne: Pious oaths or swearing in Middle English? An assessment of genres 815
65. Historical linguistics. Language groups and families
66. On the linguistic prehistory of Finno-Ugric 829
67. The development of the Germanic suffix -isk- 863
68. A case of divergent phonological evolution in West Germanic 873
69. Some West Indo-European words of uncertain origin 879
70. The history of linguistics
71. Baudouin de Courtenay on Lautgesetze 911
72. ‘Speculative’ historical linguistics 923
73. Language contact, language history and history of linguistics: John Palsgrave’s “Anglo-French” grammar (1530) 929
74. Language contact and change. Contact
75. Cross-dialectal parallels and language contacts: Evidence from Celtic Englishes 943
76. A note on the use of data from non-standard varieties of English in linguistic argumentation 959
77. Arguments for creolisation in Irish English 969
78. Romance Germanic contact and the peripheral vowel feature 1039
79. The cline of creoleness in negation patterns of Caribbean English creoles 1055
80. Change
81. How languages living apart together may innovate their systems (as illustrated by to in Russian) 1069
82. Lexical diffusion and evolution theory 1083
83. Types and tokens in language change: Some evidence from Romance 1099
84. A sound change in progress? 1113
85. Grammatical ambiguity and language change 1125