Notes on developments in the category adjective from Old to Middle English

Theme:Middle English literature.The age of G.Ghauser
Plan:

1. 
   The Old English situation
   
2. 
   The situation in Middle English: A brief discussion of the literature
   
3. 
   Other changes in the grammar of Old and Middle English
   
4. 
   Description of the Middle English corpus and the data used
   

The Old English situation

In my research on the position of the adjective in Old English, I came to the conclusion that the variation was not free (which is what one reads in most grammars of Old English). Instead, I proposed that the variation is meaningful, at least in some contexts, and that it is conditioned by a number of syntactic, semantic and discourse/pragmatic factors. I also showed that these factors are not arbitrary, i.e. specific to Old English, but motivated, and that a similar use of postposition can be found in some Romance languages (i.e. Spanish and Italian) and in Modern Greek (see Fischer 2000 for details). On the basis of this, I put forward the hypothesis (based ultimately on Bolinger 1972 [1952]) that Old English adjective position may have been iconically motivated.¹

In brief, the iconic principle behind this entails that the interpretation of an NP containing an AP is influenced by the linear order in which the elements in the NP are processed. In other words, when the AP precedes the head noun, the adjective (phrase) modifies our perception of the head noun: adjective plus head form a whole, a kind of compound and together they constitute one information unit. When the AP follows the head noun, the head noun gets processed first, and forms a chunk of information by itself, while the AP that follows gives additional information about the entity referred to by the noun, i.e. it forms a separate information unit. This iconic principle of linear or sequential order is one of the subtypes of ‘iconicity of motivation’ (cf. Haiman 1980), which is a form of diagrammatic iconicity. Iconicity of motivation “exploit[s] the resulting linearity of the linguistic sign” so that “the order of elements in language parallels that in physical experience or the order of knowledge” (Haiman 1980: 528). In this case the linear order clearly affects our perception, and hence our knowledge or interpretation of the structure.
The semantic difference between the two orders can to some extent be compared to the Present-day English difference between a bláckbird or a ládybird (i.e. an insect), on the one hand, and a bláck bírd or a lády bírd (i.e a female bird), on the other.² In Old English, adjective-noun compounds like blackbird were less frequent, as were noun-noun compounds of the type ladybird, sunlight or stone wall (cf. Rosenbach 2004, who refers to Jespersen 1949: ii, section 13). The reason for this rarity is presumably because these phrases still had transparent morphology,³ which would put a brake on their lexicalization into a compound. Instead of adjective-noun compounds, therefore, Old English generally used a preposed, weak [WK] adjective + noun in order to convey that ‘blackness’ is inherent to the bird, i.e. that blackness is seen as a defining property of the bird in question, in a particular context. Another possibility was to nominalize the adjective: e.g. the phrase se blinda[WK] man could also be expressed by se blinda, a construction that became impossible after the Middle English period.⁴ In order to convey the Present-day English phrase a bláck bírd – in which black functions as a new information unit (and hence has equal stress with the noun) – Old English could use either the same order as Present-day English but with black declined as a strong adjective, or it could use the postnominal order, a bird black, which iconically indicates in its word order that the topic of conversation is a bird and that that bird in addition happens to be black.
In other words, in the Old English system new information (which usually entails indefiniteness) was conveyed either by the use of a strong adjective prenominally or by the use of a strong adjective in postnominal position. When the adjective contained given information, it would precede the noun and be weak. I should make clear that in this paper I will use the terms ‘given/new’ in a fairly general sense, and, similarly, other related terms such as ‘topic/comment’, ‘topic/focus’, ‘theme/rheme’ etc. All these terms are used differently (cf. Keizer (to appear: Ch. 3) for a convenient overview), but what they have in common is that ‘topic/theme/given’ adds least to the advancing process of communication (it is non-salient), while ‘comment/focus/rheme/new’ adds extra information (it is salient). In addition, the theme usually occurs early in the clause and rheme late. Theme/rheme is therefore a useful distinction when investigating the place of the adjective within NP structure. I will argue that postposed adjectives are generally rhematic, while thematic adjectives are placed early in the NP. Other terms that are useful in connection with the NP structure, and which can be seen to be linked to the above, are ‘restrictive’ vs ‘non-restrictive’, and ‘attributive’ vs ‘predicative’. It will be shown that rhematic adjectives are generally non-restrictive and predicative.
With the grammaticalization of a determiner system, the situation described for Old English was disturbed.⁵ Normally in Old English an adjective in a definite NP conveyed given information and in an indefinite NP new information, but this was not fully grammaticalized (i.e. there were no obligatory (in)definite determiners). Thus, the discourse-semantic parameter of (in)definiteness functioned not purely lexically (i.e. by means of determiners) but in combination with two other morpho-syntactic parameters, involving position and type of adjective inflexion. All three collaborated in the information structure of the discourse. The situation in Old English would have been more or less as follows: