I'm told

Wed Aug 12 13:28:29 UTC 1998

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>With regard to the retention of bare objects, Benji Wald comments:
>
>It should be added that there remains a residue of this process in some
>(British) English dialects.  That is, with a few verbs, esp. the
>"arch-dative" verb 'give' (but also "show"), the variation in object order
>has continued into the twentieth century (and even has a coherent
>geographic distribution according to the British dialect atlas reflecting
>the rural mid 20th c.)  It seems to be largely if not exclusively limited
>to the inanimate pronominal theme "it", as well as to certain verbs, e.g.,
>"give/show it me" (maybe even the recipient has to be a pronoun).
>

This is certainly correct, but when I was talking about 'bare NP objects' I
was referring to nominal, rather than pronominal objects-something that I
could have made clearer.   In my investigation of texts, I found this
progression:
1.Two bare nominal objects in the order Theme Recipient disappear in the
mid-14thC; the last example I found was 1340. However, when a pronoun was
involved, the ordr TH REC was still possible; this happened when the Theme
was a pronoun, regardless of whether the Recipient was a noun or a pronoun.
In other words, a pronominal object still always preceded a nominal one,
and when both were pronouns, the normal order was Th REC, just as it still
is for some British varieties.

2. The first few true examples of 'he was given a book' are found later on
in the 14thC.

3. By the early 16thC, there are no more examples in my texts of ProTh NREC
order, although TH REC is the only order found when both objects are
pronouns.  This is still the situation as I understand it for a lot of
British English speakers-i.e. He gave it him but *he gave it the king.

4. I US, Australian and some varieties of British English, the order REC TH
has completely generalised so that it is the only possible order even with
two pronouns.  (Of course, a prepositional phrase instead is always
possible, and is the only possibility with some combinations of pronouns).

Of course, not all varieties of Modern English are the same in this
respect.  I have been told that some varieties of British English still
allow 'He gave a gift the king' with two nominal objects in the TH REC
order, and I would be glad to learn more about this.  But the situation I
described is what I found in the written texts.

>I have long been interested in this issue, and also why the areal
>distribution is what it is, and why IO-DO order has been the trend for
>fixed order in most dialects.   Cynthia mentions that the last problem is
>related to pragmatic features of topicality in discourse which favors the
>animate= indirect object as more often topical and given than the inanimate
>= direct object, so the ordering is related to grammaticalisation of
>pragmatic information structure of given before new in specific contexts.

Where do I say this?  It is certainly true that animates generally tend to
be more topical than inanimates, but saying that the indirect object is
normally more topical than the direct one does not seem to explain why the
REC TH order was actually in a slight minority with two nominal objects in
OE but this order increased in ME.  Nor does it seem to explain why TH REC
was always some much more frequent than REC TH with two pronouns.  I agree
with Benji that the matter is complex and cannot be explained simply as the
grammaticalisation of an order which is more frequent for pragmatic
reasons.  What I actually said was simply that the REC TH order (with two
nominals) became progressively more dominant.

Later on, he says:
>
>In any case, the lexical angle occurred to me because of some facts in some
>Bantu languages, where historically passivisations akin to English indirect
>passivisation are commonplace, and in some languages have even evolved to
>exclude direct (theme) passivisation when there is more than one "object".
>This is relevant to Cynthia's comment:
>
>>.... (late 14th century), the indirect passives appear
>>because grammatically, the recipient is indistinguishable from the theme.
>
>The key word is "grammatically".  C's passage implies equation of
>grammatical object with unmarked argument, hence accusative/dative where
>these are no longer overtly distinguished. Nevertheless, why should
>speakers reinterpret non-themes as grammatical objects (and thus passivise
>them), absence of marking notwithstanding?

I want to repeat here what I said earlier: there was apparently no equation
of grammatical object with unmarked argument until the position of the old
(nominal) IO became identical to the position of a DO of a mono-transitive
verb: directly postverbal.  The explanation that I suggest for why a
language-learner would make such an equation crucially involves a level of
grammatical relations, as opposed to semantic relations, and assumes that
listeners like to use processing strategies that make use of either
case-marking or grammatical relations.  My idea is that once the order of
two nominal objects became fixed, the language-learner came up with this
processing strategy:

Assume that the first postverbal NP is the (direct) object, unless an
object clitic has already been encountered.

(the proviso about the object clitic is necessary because of the retention
of pronoun-TH order).
The listener can then retrieve the semantic role through the grammatical
role, because that's how verbs are stored in the lexicon.  Such a
processing strategy would have been of no use earlier, when the order was
variable but there was no distinction in case marking, because it was not
possible to make a direct link between constituent structure and
grammatical relation.   I refer any interested party to Chapter 9 of my
book for further discussion of this approach.

Later on:
>Interestingly, English shows further development from indirect
>passivisation to prepositional passivisation, as in: this bed was eaten
>potato chips in, etc.  (I think I have the chronological order right, if it
>is really clear.  Does the preference for "the boy was given a book" over
>"the boy was given a book TO" have anything to do with historical order of
>stabilisation of the two types of passive?)  So, eventually (in fact,
>fairly quickly) passivisation transcended whether role is marked or not.
>Again, this does not seem to have been inevitable, just possible
>(obviously, since it occurred).  Maybe Cynthia can comment further on the
>historical relationship between these two processes in English and whether
>there was anything else favoring the generalisation of passsivisation,
>which I suspect was not an inevitable one.

There's  a substantial literature on the prepositional passive in English,
and anyone interested in the facts would do well to start with David
Denison's 1993 book *English Historical Syntax*-Chapter 7 is entirely
devoted to prep. passives and Denison's summary of earlier studies as well
as the facts is excellent.  I think that the reason why 'He was given a
book to' is not favored in English is simply that if you are going to make
a recipient be the subject, you might as well make it a core role (the
object) to start with, instead of making it an oblique.  I don't think it
has anything to do with the historical progression.  Certainly, what
Denison refers to as the 'complex prepostional passive' (e.g. he was taken
advantage of) seems to have entered the language a bit later than the
'indirect' passive, but not that much longer-there are convincing examples
from the early 15th C.

In his next message, Benji comments on the various fates of different
verbs; in some instances, the Experiencer ends up a nominative subject, in
others, a prepositional object, etc.  The general point is certainly valid
(and well known).  I discuss some of the individual verbs in my book. I
agree completely with Benji's comment:
> Lexical peculiarities of individual verbs mitigate any
>exclusive direction of syntactic development

But I don't completely agree with all the details, and  I'd like to respond
to what Benji says about 'please':

>French "please" into ME got caught up with "like", but seems to retain only
>limited use with DAT > NOM, e.g., "they do what they please, when they
>please, if they please", compared to the range of contexts in which the
>experiencer remains the object, e.g., it pleases them to listen, listening
>pleases them, etc.

This rather makes it sound as though there was a general DAT>NOM trend with
'please' which only survived in that construction, but the reality seems to
be that the Experiencer of *please* was always unambiguously the object
except in this construction, where it starts showing up as a nominative
subject in the early 16thC.  I wrote an article on this verb called 'On
doing as you please' which appeared in *Historical Pragmatics* edited by
Andreas Jucker in 1995 and I also have a section in it in that book which I
keep referring to.  No ambiguity-driven syntactic reanalysis can have been
involved for two reasons (1) the 'reanalysis' takes place much too late and
(2) there was no model for a syntactic reanalysis; i.e. sentences like 'the
king will do as the king pleases' are not found until 'the king will do as
he pleases' are also found; before this, 'the king will do as it pleases
the king (or him)' is the only possibility.  It is in fact quite surprising
how clearly object-like this experiencer is until it becomes a subject in
this limited construction-nearly always postverbal and usually a (clearly
object case) pronoun.  So I think that we have to look at the semantics of
the construction here.  This experiencer is in fact more agentive than the
experiencer of please usually is, because the construction is explicitly
saying that I am in change of my own pleasure.  So I think the experiencer
started to get treated as a possible subject because it was similar
semantically to a typical agentive subject, not because there was any
confusion as to its grammatical relation .  Of course, the object option
remained as a possibility for a long time too.

And:

>In any case, the lexical longevity of the "methinks" type of verb contrasts
>with the relatively rapid thoroughness with which DAT *passives* were
>reanalysed as NOM=Object passives.

It is certainly correct that the 'impersonal' verbs lingered much longer
than the 'impersonal' passives of monotransitive verbs, which disappeared
by the early thirteenth century.  I interpret this as meaning that the
possibility of case-marking marking objects lexically disappeared when the
dative and accusative cases collapsed together.  So we no longer get 'him
was demed'.  But I analyse the Experiencer of the impersonal 'methinks'
etc. as a subject, despite the object case.  Lexical case marking to
subjects was retained because it was clearly distinct from the normal
(structural) case for subjects.  We still get impersonal uses like this
until the early 16thC, although less and less frequently.  Then they are
reduced to fixed expressions like 'methink(s)'.

I'm afraid that I will have tried the patience of any histlingers who have
bothered to read this far and hereby declare my intention of ceasing to
repeat what I have already said in print-for the time being, at least!

:

Cynthia Allen
Linguistics, Arts Faculty
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200
Australia