27.2535, Review: Historical Ling; History of Ling; Ling & Lit; Syntax: Andrew (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2535. Wed Jun 08 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2535, Review: Historical Ling; History of Ling; Ling & Lit; Syntax: Andrew (2015)

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Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2016 13:43:44
From: Caterina Saracco [caterina.saracco at unibg.it]
Subject: Syntax and Style in Old English

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36150337


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-4968.html

AUTHOR: S. O.  Andrew
TITLE: Syntax and Style in Old English
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Caterina Saracco, (MIUR) Ministero dell'Istruzione Università e Ricerca

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar Dry

SUMMARY 

“Syntax and Style in Old English” is a book by S.O. Andrew that was originally
published at the Cambridge University Press in 1940 and now proposed again in
a paperback edition by the same publisher.

At that time it was the first attempt to describe the syntax of the Old
English language. After a short preface and a list of abbreviations, the work
is organized in twelve chapters of different lengths in which Andrew tackles
some of the major problems of the Old English syntax in prose and poetry. For
reasons of space and time, reference is frequently made to the “traditional”
prose and verse texts: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede, Ælfric’s Pentatheuc,
Homilies, Lives of Saints and Orosius; Beowulf, Andrea, Juliana, Exodus,
Judith and the Genesis.

Chapter I is a very general introduction about the three types of Old English
word-order: common (subj.-verb-obj.-adv.), which usually occurs in main
clauses (called “principal sentences” by the author); conjunctive
(conj.-subj.-pron.-verb), which is the normal order in subordinate clauses,
after coordinating conjunctions, after relative pronouns and some other
adverbs when they occur in first position; and demonstrative
(adv.-verb-subj.-pron.), which can be found in main clauses after the
demonstrative adverbs þā, þonne and þǣr. After that Andrew starts to enquire
“whether certain sentence-forms […], which in all printed texts - both prose
and verse - appear frequently as principal sentences, can be accepted as such”
and whether they are really subordinate or coordinate clauses. 

In Chapter II he analyzes main clauses introduced by þā (that can be both an
adverb meaning “then” and a conjunction meaning “when”, “since”), which have a
common/conjunctive word-order instead of a demonstrative one. The method he
uses is twofold: first Andrew discusses the two kinds of sentence (the þā +
subj. + verb type and the þā + verb + subj. type) in texts which are
translated from Latin and he compares them with the Latin original; secondly
he examines supposed exceptions to the rule in texts which are not
translations, seeking an alternative explanation. The author says (and this is
one of the reasons that encouraged him to write this book) that these
exceptions happen because of a wrong punctuation of the poems by modern
editors. Not only in this chapter, but also in several other parts of his
book, he illustrates how a better punctuation of Old English texts could
establish quite clearly some “anomalous” type of principal or subordinate
clauses as a genuine Old English idiom: “A better repunctuation, without any
emendation of the text, provides an alternative construction, the construction
which everyone admits is the normal one for that type of sentence” (p. 17). 

In Chapter III the author examines instances from prose and poetry of
principal sentences with common or conjunctive order in which þǣr or þonne are
the headwords. The method adopted is the same, and again Andrew puts forward
as alternative solution to the supposed wrong word-order a new punctuation,
because sentences of the þā/þonne/þǣr + subj. + verb form are always, both in
prose and verse, subordinate clauses and not principal ones; the principal
sentence-forms with a þā/þonne/þǣr + verb + subj. word-order are instead
ambiguous and can be explained as a particular type of correlation, or an
adjustment for metrical reasons (not always correct). 

Chapter IV is dedicated to the explanation of the same word-order problem in
sentences introduced by words such as ǣr, forðam, nu, siððan, swa, þeah, which
may be either adverbs or conjunctions and, therefore, they may have a
different meaning and require a common or conjunctive order. Also here Andrew
concludes that when these words stand first in a sentence in prose they are
only conjunctions and should occur with conjunctive order (and therefore the
sentences are not principal); if they are adverbs and are followed by the
common word-order, then the sentences turn out ambiguous, both in prose and
verse, although “the ambiguity is naturally a frequent source of
mispunctuation in our printed texts” (p. 32). 

Chapters V and XII are dedicated to the explanation of the forms and uses of
the relative and demonstrative pronouns in Old English and the word-order they
require. The thirteen pages of Part V appeared as a separate paper in Language
12(4) in 1936. Here Andrew proves that, in prose, any of the Old English
nominative demonstrative pronouns se-seo-þæt  (other than the neut.nom.) can
stand in sentence initial position, except in the case that they function as
antecedents. Any supposed instance to the contrary is really a relative
pronoun, and with repunctuation the faulty sentences become regular. Again
about pronouns, Andrew illustrates in Chapter VI the order of nominative,
accusative and dative pronouns in principal and subordinate sentences, drawing
some notable conclusions. 

Part VII is devoted to the syntax of negative sentences and to the meaning of
negative words in prose and in poetry. Finally, the next three Chapters VIII -
IX - X and part of XI are completely devoted to ʿPoetic Idiomsʾ of Beowulf:
with many instances it is shown that the paratactic nature of language in this
work is not so prevalent as it seems to be because of a wrong punctuating of
the editors’ texts: “Nothing is left to the paratactic style; except for the
occasional use of idiomatic parataxis, itself a subordinating device, the
prevailing sentence-structure is not paratactic at all but periodic” (p. 100).

EVALUATION

Andrew’s treatise was, at the time of the original publication, perhaps the
first attempt to provide a scientific description of some unexplored features
of Old English Syntax; and we can say that this book was a good result at that
time, but that the methodology is far from accurate if considered from the
point of view of modern study of grammar and modern philology. ʿSyntax and
Style in Old Englishʾ is not a book intended for beginners in Old English but,
maybe, for advanced students and scholars: sometimes quotations from Old
English prosaic or poetic texts are not translated and a small dictionary
would be a welcome addition. 

Andrew’s idea that so much can be explained as a consequence of mispunctuation
is extremely exaggerated; furthermore not always does he indicate the edition
from which he quotes Beowulf’s lines. Sometimes it seems that he wants to
reduce all the various types of sentence to a few patterns, a sort of extreme
generalization, leading to the conclusion that the same rules hold for poetry
as for prose, both in syntax and word-order. This happens, for instance, when
he discusses some ambiguous words which can be either adverbs or conjunctions
and therefore can introduce either a main or a subordinate clause. This is a
huge problem in poetry, where word order is a less certain guide than it is in
prose. Three are the solutions that he always suggests: an emendation, a
change in punctuation or a substitution. If the changes in punctuation are
sometimes likely and well motivated, words’ substitutions are put forward
because they are supposed to correct a scribal error and because in this way
the new sentences have the word-order that we expect, see p. 25: “the
head-word in 1106 [of Beowulf] is not ʿþonneʾ but ʿþætʾ and the conjunctive
order is therefore normal”. Perhaps more extreme are the emendations when the
sense of a sentence is not completely transparent or if the word-order seems
to be incorrect. Just one case the reader has to pay attention to: in Chapther
XII (§123) he discusses some solecisms in Beowulf and especially the relative
ʿþara þeʾ construction of line 205 “Hæfde se goda / Geata leoda / cempan
gecorone / þara þe he cenoste / findan mihte” which is usually translated as
“the good man had picked warriors of the Geat-folk, the boldest he could
find”. Andrew says that we must refer þara “of that” to the right noun
antecedent cempan and not Geata, because the passage has a wrong
interpretation. We think this is incorrect: Beowulf could have chosen warriors
of the Geat-folk, and of the Geats he could find the boldest, with a selective
restriction (see also Wagner 1910: 69-70). Then, again, he writes that about
line 877 of Beowulf “wide siðas / þara þe gumena bearn / gearwe ne wiston” ,
translated “great adventures of which the children of men didn’t know
entirely”, that the construction headed by þara is complete nonsense, because
there is not an antecedent noun. But we know that the case form of ʿseʾ in the
ʿse þeʾ relative construction is required by the function of the relative
pronoun in the subordinate relative clause (Fischer, van Kemenade, Koopman,
van der Wurff 2000: 59); therefore siðas “adventures” is the antecedent of the
genitive form þara of the pronoun, without a case attraction. Andrews
continues with other quotations from Beowulf, from which “it appears that
three-quarters of our eighteen þara þe clauses are syntactically irregular in
one way or another”, but however “this irregularity disappears in all of them
if we remove completely þara”. The question is over-simplified: why emend a
word eighteen times just because it can make the syntax irregular in poetry,
where we know that word-order can change also for metrical reasons? None of
the emendations he proposed on syntactical grounds is convincing. An Old
English scholar cannot hope to answer all relevant question about syntax,
because he/she lacks informants and he/she does not know the intonation
pattern of the spoken language and the right punctuation of the written one.
This is therefore a controversial book. Some of Andrew’s conclusions about
certain aspects of Old English syntax are to be agreed with, but other ideas
may be re-discussed.

This is what has been done, for instance, by Blockley (1981). She discusses
some aspects of Old English poetic syntax, and Andrew’s work is frequently
cited when she has to explain clause-initial adverbs and the subordinating
conjunction ʿondʾ “and”. Also Mitchell (1985), who wrote the most
authoritative two-volume work about Old English syntax, continuously refers to
Andrew’s book, either to discuss some his dubious points or to use  his
arguments positively. For example, when Mitchell (1985: 88-101) discusses the
ambiguous nature of Old English demonstrative/relative pronouns and the
word-order they require in clauses, he agrees with Andrew’s view that
punctuation cannot help us to solve the problem about these pronouns, because
modern editors have a very different point of view on punctuating the same
manuscript. But about Andrew’s belief that hypotaxis is stylistically superior
to parataxis (when in Chapter XI Andrew does not consider the epic poem
Beowulf so paratactic as other scholars suppose, pp. 94-100), Mitchell (1985:
91) writes that this opinion has turned Andrew into a prescriptive grammarian
of Old English, who changes a paratactic Old English sentence into a periodic
Modern English one only on the assumption that his “grammar rules” are right
and the manuscripts are written in a wrong syntactic word-order. 

Also Traugott refers to Andrew’s book in the Cambridge History of English
Language, when she examines complex Old English sentences like those
introduced by þā, þonne, and þær: she agrees with Andrew’s view that the
modern punctuation of poems cannot help us to disambiguate the adverbial or
conjunction function of these words or to establish independency vs.
connectivity, but she specifies that a supposed wrong word-order can be
justified by pragmatic factors as the introduction of a new topic or a
topicalization (Clauss Traugott 1992: 219-220).
 
To conclude, this is a useful book, especially for those scholars who want to
investigate through time the treatment of particular ambiguous cases of
main/subordinate clauses in Old English. Several Andrew’s ideas were
innovative at that time, and now this author can be rediscovered thanks to
this new paperback edition. “The reader will find that Andrew is mentioned
frequently […], sometimes with approbation, sometimes with criticisms. This is
because he is in my opinion a very important and very stimulating writer whose
work, though often reaching wrong conclusions, deserves more attention than it
has so far received” (Mitchell 1985: 89).
 
REFERENCES

Blockley, Mary E. 2001. Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax: Where Clauses
Begin. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Fischer, Olga, Kemenade, Ans van, Koopman, Willem & Wim van der Wurff. 2000.
The syntax of early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax. Vol. II. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1992. Syntax. In Richard M. Lass (ed.), Cambridge
History of the English Language, vol. 3, 168-289. Cambridge & New York:
Cambridge University Press.

Wagner, Reinhard. 1910. Die Syntax des Superlativs im Gothischen,
Altniederdeutschen, Althochdeutschen, Fruhmittelhochdeutschen, im Beowulf und
in der älteren Edda. Berlin: Mayer & Müller.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a Ph.D student of the University of Pavia. My doctoral dissertation will
be about the Semantics and Morphosyntax of bahuvrihi compounds in West and
East Old Germanic Languages, using a Cognitive Linguistics framework
(supervisor Prof. Silvia Luraghi).

Now I am a teaching assistant at the University of Pavia (Historical
Linguistics, Italian Grammar and General Linguistics).

My research interests are Old Saxon Morphosyntax, Metaphors and Metonimies in
Old Saxon Heliand, Germanic Bahuvrihi compounds, Cognitive Linguistics applied
to Old Germanic Languages.





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