Table Of ContentTHE MIDDLE ENGLISH SUBJECT-VERB CLUSTER
JANUA LINGUARUM
STUDIA MEMORIAE
NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA
edenda curat
C.H. VAN SCHOONEVELD
INDIANA UNIVERSITY
SERIES PRACTICA
26
1969
MOUTON
THE HAGUE • PARIS
THE
MIDDLE ENGLISH
SUBJECT-VERB CLUSTER
by
ANDREW MACLEISH
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
1969
MOUTON
THE HAGUE • PARIS
© Copyright 1969 in The Netherlands.
Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague.
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm,
or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-23809
Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.
ABBREVIATIONS
PT The Parson's Tale
Mel The Tale of Melibee
Ast A Treatise on the Astrolabe
Wic Wiclif's Of Feigned Contemplative Life
App Usk's Appeal
Pet The First Petition to Parliament in English
BD The Book of the Duchess
KnT The Knight's Tale
TC. V Troilus and Criseyde, Part V
GP The General Prologue
PardT The Pardoner's Tale
NPT The Nun's Priest's Tale
S Subject
Aux Auxiliary Verb
V Verb
Part Participle
Adv Adverb
Adv Phr Adverbial Phrase
Adv CI Adverbial Clause
IO Indirect Object (dative or periphrastic)
Do (O) Accusative Object
neg Negative Particle
SubC (SC) Subjective Complement
X Any element(s) following a verbal form
Inf Infinitive
OE Old English
EME Early Middle English
ME Middle English
MnE Modern English
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS . . 5
1. INTRODUCTION 9
2. LATE EAST MIDLAND PROSE 15
I. The Patterns of Subject and Verb in Independent Clauses . . .. 15
II. The Patterns of Subject and Verb in Dependent Clauses . . .. 26
III. Interrogative Clusters 35
IV. The Position of the Indirect Object in Independent Clauses . .. 36
A Description of Charts 38
Charts 39
3. LATE EAST MIDLAND POETRY 100
I. The Patterns of Subject and Verb in Independent Clauses . . 100
II. The Patterns of Subject and Verb in Dependent Clauses . . . 118
III. Interrogative Clusters 132
IV. The Position of the Indirect Object in Independent Clauses . . . 134
Charts 136
4. CONCLUSION 202
I. Common and Uncommon Order in Prose 204
II. Synthetic Order 209
III. The Differences between Prose and Poetic Word Order Norms 216
IV. Some Temptations in Chauceriana 222
Summary Charts 224
APPENDIX 235
BIBLIOGRAPHY 274
1
INTRODUCTION
In his chapter entitled "Fluctuation of Forms", Leonard Bloomfield makes a sug-
gestion about the quantitative recording of fluctuations in frequency of occurrences
over a given period of time:
Fluctuations in the frequency of forms could be accurately observed if we had a record of
every utterance that was made in a speech-community during whatever period of time we
wanted to study. We could then keep a tally-sheet for every form (including grammatical
forms, such as the type he ran away, he fell down in contrast with away he ran; down he fell);
whenever an utterance was made, we could score a point on the tally-sheet of every form
in this utterance. In this way we should obtain tables or graphs which showed the ups and
downs in frequency of every form during the time covered by our records. Such a system
of scoring will doubtless remain beyond our powers, but this imaginary system gives us a
picture of what is actually going on at all times in every speech community.1
Bloomfield's imaginary system approached reality in 1940 with the publication of
the American English Grammar,2 a book in which Fries demands formal rather than
semantic identity of sentence elements and emphasizes the idea of frequency of
occurrence. By implication he suggests that the task of formal grammar is also
quantitative: the development of methods for observation and classification of the
frequencies of occurrence of qualitatively defined structural units. In his chapter
on The Uses of Word Order Fries' implications for earlier stages of the language
are obvious. While the results of qualitative analysis furnish the indispensable basis
upon which quantitative study must rest, linguistic analysis is still primarily quali-
tative. The descriptive techniques of phonetics, phonemics, morphology, and syntax
aim generally to analyze the nature and variety of linguistic phenomena rather than
their magnitude and frequency. Thus, many problems in the history of English
syntax need careful reworking and a quantitative presentation of facts at narrowly
defined synchronic stages.
In his Chapter X Fries discusses the fixed, or grammatical, positions in the exo-
centric actor-action-goal sequence in MnE statements. But he does not describe
the situation out of which these fixed positions grew. Accordingly, a study was
undertaken to document as completely as possible, on a quantitative basis, the
1 Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York, 1933), p. 394.
s Charles C. Fries, American English Grammar (New York, 1940).
10 INTRODUCTION
development of word order in the Subject-Verb cluster in Late East Midland.
Since the ME Subject-Verb cluster is to some extent different from its MnE counter-
part it needs definition. It consists, first, of the two immediate constituents which
make up structures of predication. The subject is most frequently a noun or structure
with a noun as its headword. It may, of course, be any part of speech up to included
clauses. The predicate consists of the verb alone or a sequence which has the verb
as its head. Because it is still somewhat synthetic in its patterning procedures, the
ME Subject-Verb cluster sometimes contains within it, in pre-verb position, accusa-
tive objects, dative and periphrastic indirect objects, and adverbial elements. The
position of these elements in relationship to the verb must also be described.
Since the concern of this study is with the distribution and frequency of word-
order patterns it is frankly taxonomic in nature. The positions in which the con-
stituents occur are, for the most part, shared, but little attempt has been made at
formal description of the form classes or phrases that share the positions. Since
the study concerns itself with word-order rather than element order, an effort has
been made to account for discontinuous patterning of Subject and Verb, but no
effort is made to generate a given phrase structure or show how this structure yields
another by the application of transformational rules.
Patterns of word-order are of two different ranks as they embrace the basic struc-
ture of the phrase or as they operate to connect modifiers to words modified. Lin-
guists working in the field with language generally recognize the fact that, at times,
word-order may not only be a structural signal but a physical feature of speech
without being a structural element of any system. Accordingly, they delineate five
kinds of order: random sequence, in which all possible patterns occur; preferential
sequence, in which one of several patterns is favored; conventional sequence, in
which all or nearly members of a speech community agree in using only one (or
some small number) of the possible patterns; logical sequence, in which the order
is determined by different organizations of reality and the like; and systemic sequence,
in which the order of speech elements is no less a part of the signalling system than
the elements themselves.
The synchronic study which follows, since it deals with the written records of
Middle English, recognizes various word-order sequences as being systemic. The
work is synchronic in that it is first a study of how structures of predication pattern
within a narrowly-defined limit of time regardless of their past or future shapes.
This study, then, deals with patterning of subjectivals, auxiliaries, finite verbs,
participles as well as those forms which are contained within the actor-action cluster
in pre-verb position in any kind of permutation: accusative objects, dative and
periphrastic indirect objects, and adverbials. Two large divisions of word-order
are seen, common and uncommon. These terms are numerical in their meaning
and include a large number of sub-categories. There are two clustering processes
in common order: analytic and synthetic. Analytic order occurs when the Auxiliary
and/or the Verb immediately follows the Subject, as is the case in over 90 % of the
