Abstract
This paper reconsiders the history of two little-known third-person pronouns – 3pl. acc. his and 3sg. fem. acc. his – attested only during Middle English. Competing theories of their origins are evaluated and a novel account is proposed. The paper highlights an important gap in our understanding of the history of English oblique pronouns and supplies the most comprehensive description yet published of the distribution of these innovative forms.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Joanna Kopaczyk, Meg Laing, Roger Lass, Ben Molineaux, two anonymous reviewers and (especially) FoLH’s editor-in-chief for their most valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Pronoun innovation in Middle English
- A diachronic view of Zamucoan verb inflection
- A new interpretation of Lachmann’s Law
- Event-centrality and the pragmatics–semantics interface in Kikongo: From predication focus to progressive aspect and vice versa
- The origin of the causative prefix in Rgyalrong languages and its implication for proto-Sino-Tibetan reconstruction
- Exaptation and phonological change
- Reconstruction and idiomaticity: The origin of Russian verbless clauses reconsidered
- The historical phonology of Mawé glides
- Reviews
- David Willis, Christopher Lucas, and Anne Breitbarth: The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean
- Coulter H. George: Expressions of time in Ancient Greek
- Kim Gerdes, Eva Hajičová & Leo Wanner: Dependency Linguistics. Recent advances in linguistic theory using dependency structures
- IE.com: Websites relevant to Indo-European Historical Linguistics
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Pronoun innovation in Middle English
- A diachronic view of Zamucoan verb inflection
- A new interpretation of Lachmann’s Law
- Event-centrality and the pragmatics–semantics interface in Kikongo: From predication focus to progressive aspect and vice versa
- The origin of the causative prefix in Rgyalrong languages and its implication for proto-Sino-Tibetan reconstruction
- Exaptation and phonological change
- Reconstruction and idiomaticity: The origin of Russian verbless clauses reconsidered
- The historical phonology of Mawé glides
- Reviews
- David Willis, Christopher Lucas, and Anne Breitbarth: The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean
- Coulter H. George: Expressions of time in Ancient Greek
- Kim Gerdes, Eva Hajičová & Leo Wanner: Dependency Linguistics. Recent advances in linguistic theory using dependency structures
- IE.com: Websites relevant to Indo-European Historical Linguistics