26.3012, Review: Computational Ling; Historical Ling; Morphology; Syntax; Text/Corpus Ling: Cole (2014)

Wed Jun 24 16:10:20 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-3012. Wed Jun 24 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.3012, Review: Computational Ling; Historical Ling; Morphology; Syntax; Text/Corpus Ling: Cole (2014)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, Sara Couture)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
              http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Sara  Couture <sara at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2015 12:09:47
From: Mark Faulkner [m.faulkner at shef.ac.uk]
Subject: Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphosyntax and the (Northern) Subject Rule

Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36010957

Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-3215.html

AUTHOR: Marcelle  Cole
TITLE: Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphosyntax and the (Northern) Subject Rule
SERIES TITLE: NOWELE Supplement Series 25
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Mark Faulkner, University of Sheffield

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This monograph, adapted from Cole’s PhD thesis (Universidad de Sevilla, 2012),
offers evidence that the Northern Subject Rule was not an innovation in late
medieval English, but that a related subject rule operates in the Old
Northumbrian of the gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels, copied in the second
half of the tenth century.

Chapter 1, the introduction, begins by defining the grammatical constraint
which is at the heart of the book. In Northern Middle English, under a system
most commonly referred to as the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), verbal agreement
was conditioned not by the traditional categories of number and person, but by
subject type and adjacency, so that ‘the plural marker was –s unless the verb
had an immediately adjacent personal pronoun subject in which case the marker
was the reduced –e or the zero morpheme –ø’ (p. 1). Anticipating an argument
developed at more length in Chapter 3, Cole notes the presence of similar
agreement patterns in non-Northern dialects, and proposes dropping the word
‘Northern’. It is the purpose of the book to investigate whether a similar
Subject Rule motivates two kinds of variation in the gloss to the Lindisfarne
Gospels: (1) between –ð and –s as present tense markers; (2) between reduced
(–e or –ø) and full morphology in several parts of the verb.

Chapter 2, ‘Old Northumbrian’, outlines the evidence that survives for this
dialect, and surveys previous work on the date, authorship and scribe(s) of
the gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. Cole then discusses the language of the
gloss, pointing out that it contains numerous innovative morphological
features, before giving a description of the sociolinguistic situation in
Northumbria, emphasising contact with Celtic and Old Norse. Details are then
given of Old Northumbrian present tense morphology, particularly the
co-existence of historical <-ð> and innovative <-s> and the various
explanations offered in the literature for the emergence of the latter.

Chapter 3, ‘A Diachronic Overview of the (Northern) Subject Rule’, reports the
findings of past studies regarding the operation of a subject rule in
different varieties of English, including Northern English and Scots, Early
Modern London English, Southwestern Englishes, Irish English, North American
Englishes and African American Vernacular English. After a brief discussion of
the operation of subject rules with the verb ‘to be’, evidence for levelling
and subject effects in other Germanic languages is offered. These case studies
enable Cole to argue that the NSR can ‘plausibly be viewed as the categorical
demonstration of a tendency prevalent in English as a whole for subject type
to govern the selection of morphological variants’ (p. 85).       

Along with the following chapter, Chapter 4, ‘A Variationist Study of –s/-ð
Present-Tense Markings in Late Old Northumbrian’ is the book’s most original
contribution to understanding the NSR. It is based on an exhaustive
quantitative analysis of 3053 present-tense instances of 313 verb types in the
gloss (full lists of these types and tokens appear in Appendices B and D).
After explaining her protocols for data collection, coding and analysis, Cole
presents her findings. Broadly, these are that the following environments
favour –s over -ð: (1) an adjacent pronomial subject; (2) the preceding
occurrence of an –s ending; (3) a preceding dental or affricate; (4) certain
verbs. From (1), Cole is able to conclude that a Subject Rule operated in Old
Northumbrian.

Chapter 5, ‘Reduced Verbal Morphology in late Old Northumbrian’, looks at
around 35 present-tense verb forms from the Lindisfarne Gloss that show
reduced morphology, challenging the generalisation that such forms are not
found in Northumbrian. Unlike in West-Saxon, where such forms are found solely
with first- and second-person plural pronoun subjects in contexts of
subject-verb inversion, in Lindisfarne they occur in all plural environments,
provided there is an adjacent personal pronoun – another manifestation of the
Subject Rule. Cole offers various possible sources for this reduced
morphology, emphasising the influence of the present subjunctive, and
preterite and preterite-present verbs.  

Chapter 6, ‘Explaining Subject and Adjacency Effects’, provides a review of
past explanations for the development of the Subject Rule type constraints,
distinguishing between internal factors and analyses based on language
contact. Taking ideas from both approaches, Cole suggests that language
contact and adult second language acquisition triggered morphological
simplification, destabilising the inherited system based on number and person,
leaving the distinction between pronomial and non-pronomial subjects
cognitively more salient to children acquiring English.

The concluding chapter offers a brief summary of the argument, suggesting the
need for further work on other Old Northumbrian texts to see whether Subject
Rule effects are found in these also. A list of references, seven appendices
and an index follow.

EVALUATION

Cole demonstrates beyond any doubt that a Subject Rule guides the selection of
<-s> and <-ð> in present tense verbs in the English of the gloss to the
Lindisfarne Gospels. She also raises the possibility that NP/Pro constraints
may also govern its use of reduced endings. She offers a plausible explanation
for the emergence of these effects, and a rich collection of evidence for the
operation of similar rules throughout the history of English.

The broader significance of these findings remains in doubt, however. Cole
treats the data she collects as evidence for the operation of a Subject Rule
in Old Northumbrian, yet it is questionable whether one text can be taken as
representative of a variety. Other Old Northumbrian texts exist, indeed more
than Cole suggests. In addition to canonical texts like the Durham Ritual
Gloss and Rushworth 2, there survive a number of eleventh-century legal
documents, including Gospatric’s Writ from Cumbria (which contains several
Celtic loanwords, so speaks to Celtic-English contact in the North) and
vernacular writs issued by Walcher and Ranulf Flambard, successive
post-Conquest bishops of Durham. The latter document, at least, seems to
follow the Subject Rule as articulated by Cole: the greeting ‘R. bisceop
greteð’ (Bishop Ranulf greets) with its heavy NP subject has full morphology,
but the first verb of the anathema, ‘And hua sua braues ðisses, braue Crist
hine þisses liues hele’ (And whoever violates this, may Christ deprive him of
his health in this life), with an indefinite pronomial subject, has –s. 

While Cole shows an impressive awareness of the paleographical and textual
issues that the Lindisfarne Gloss raises, she never quite solves the issue of
whether Aldred was the only scribe responsible for the Lindisfarne Gloss, and
how far he (and any collaborators he had) made use of pre-existing sources,
and may have been influenced by their language. These issues have a direct
bearing on any variation found within in the gloss (since variation in a
copied text might represent not the variation of a spoken idiolect, but the
variation created by inconsistent dialect translation during copying) and the
claim that the Gloss can represent Old Northumbrian as a whole (since Aldred
may have adopted non-Northumbrian forms from an exemplar). Cole’s main attempt
to control for these issues comes in §4.2.4 where she partitions her data for
present-tense morphology into 23 sections, and compares them. Her linguistic
findings here are compatible with previous philological and palaeographical
studies that suggested breaks at the beginning of Mark and John, and she duly
conducts her statistical tests on two datasets, one comprising all four
gospels, the other just Mark, Luke and John. However, the questions remain of
whose language she is analysing and whether it can represent Old Northumbrian.
Comparison with Aldred’s language in the Durham Ritual Gloss would have helped
address these.

Despite these issues, this is an important contribution to the study of the
Northern Subject Rule. It is methodologically exceptionally rigorous, lavish
in its presentation of the data and careful and fair in its summaries of past
scholarship. By demonstrating the operation of a Subject Rule in the
Lindisfarne Gloss, it opens the way to considering whether such a rule was
characteristic of Old Northumbrian more broadly, and what the perceptual
saliency of this feature was in the late Old English and early Middle English
period. Writing in the 1120s, William of Malmesbury described Northern English
as ‘inharmonious and uncouth’. One wonders if its different patterns of verbal
agreement, ones at odds with the person and number system of Latin (which was,
at that time, the language on which grammar itself was modelled), were among
the things that made it grate on his ears. The answer to that question is not
to be found in Cole’s book, but she does get us a step closer.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mark Faulkner is Lecturer in Medieval English at the University of Sheffield.

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-26-3012	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/