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

Adjectives/Adj.Phrases	New information Rheme
Given information Theme
(i) a preposed b postposed	(no) yes*	(yes) no
(ii) a weak inflexion b strong inflexion	no yes	yes no
(iii)a with a definite determiner b with an indefinite (zero) determiner	no* yes*	yes no

Table 1: Parameters in the expression of rheme/theme in NPs containing APs in Old English

Usually, the three parameters (i-iii, in Table 1) are all set in the same way (to ‘yes’ or ‘no’)

in any given NP. Thus, a postposed adjective is normally strong and appears in a phrase without a demonstrative or possessive pronoun (i.e. it is set to ‘yes’, for i, ii, and iii) (the information it contains is ‘new’), while a preposed adjective is normally weak and appears with a definite determiner (i.e. it is set to ‘no’), providing ‘given’ information.
There were four exceptions to this situation, i.e. cases where these parameters diverged. The first exception ([i,a] in Table 1), as already mentioned above, concerns the fact that it was possible and indeed frequent to prepose a strong adjective in an indefinite NP (presumably because here there was a different iconic principle at work, see below). I have indicated this frequent exception by putting ‘yes’/‘no’ in brackets here. The other exceptions are less common; they are indicated in Table 1 with an asterisk. The first concerns the combination of a weak adjective with postposition in a definite NP (i,b), as in (1)

(1) (a) god ælmihtig heo cwæð ic eom þin [DEF] þeowa clæna [WK] (Marg. 338)

God almighty, she said, I am your servant pure
(b) þis sint tacn þæs [DEF] hatan [WK] magan omihtan[WK] (Lch2.16.1.1)
this are signs of-the hot stomach inflammatory

In both cases the weak adjective does not provide new information. We already knew in (1a) that the woman was a saint, hence clæna, while omihtan expresses the same as hatan.

A third exception can be found in instances like an blinda man, where the adjective is weak and conveys given or presupposed information within the NP in spite of the indefiniteness conveyed by the numeral an.

(2) (a) þes an[INDEF] blinda[WK] mann getacnað eal mancynn þe wearð ablend þurh adames gylt … ( ÆCHom I, 10 154.10)

in-this a blind-man symbolizes all mankind, that was blinded through
Adam’s guilt
(b) ðone lichoman gesohte sum[INDEF] deaf [STR] man and feðeleas[STR]
(Mart 5[Kotzor]1924)
a-certain deaf man and crippled sought-out this body [of the saint]

In (2a) ‘blind-man’ functions as a kind of compound because the NP as a whole is the symbol of the ‘blind-man’ that here stands for all mankind; in other words a weak adjective is used – in spite of the fact that it occurs in an indefinite NP – in order to convey that the adjective is used ‘restrictively’ with respect to the noun, and that the category referred to is that of ‘the blind’ in general. In (2b), the topic of the sentence is a particular ‘man’, who in addition happens to be both ‘deaf’ and ‘crippled’. This information is not presupposed, as is the case in (2a), but it is non-restrictive and functions as a separate information unit.

The last exception involves a definite NP, but followed by a strong adjective, which conveys new information as in,

(3) Þone[DEF] ilcan ceaddan iungne [STR] (Chad.1.184)

the same Chad [when] young
Even though the NP in (3) begins with a demonstrative pronoun, making the phrase definite, the postnominal adjective is strong; it is predicative and functions as a separate unit (see Fischer 2000, Haumann 2003).
These four cases thus show that in Old English the type of determiner (definite or indefinite) does not fully govern the inflexion and position of the adjective, since the definite type does not have to co-occur with weak declension and preposition of the adjective, and in the same way adjectives in indefinite NPs do not have to be strong and postposed. With the loss of the adjectival (weak/strong) inflexions, the exceptions just noted could no longer be distinguished: it was indeed parameter (ii) in Table 1 which was most stable in Old English (i.e. it allowed of no exceptions) in terms of indicating information structure. Its loss no doubt led to a strengthening of the determiner system and a subsequent loss of parameter (i), which was already in some disarray because of the frequency of preposed strong adjectives.
Thus, the scenario for Old English must have been that with the weakening of parameters (ii) and (i) in Table 1, due to phonetic attrition and increasingly fixed word order, parameter (iii) became the crucial one to distinguish between given and new information (hence the rapid grammaticalization of the determiner system). Note that with this change, the semantic difference between a bláckbird and a bláck bírd (noted above) can no longer be shown formally in terms of weak/strong declension or pre- or postposition. This in itself may have speeded up the loss of postposition elsewhere because, if the indefinite determiner a(n) helps to convey new information, it is no longer necessary to show the same characteristic by means of postposition or a strong ending. Note furthermore that the ‘given-’ or ‘newness’ of an adjective in an indefinite NP is conveyed in Present-day English by the presence or absence of phonetic salience, i.e. heavy stress on bláck conveys phonetic salience, which, like the linear order, is also iconic (cf. Fischer 2001: 256).⁶ We have seen that this pre-position of a strong adjective was also a possibility in Old English. It is possible that this adjective was indeed already stressed, and hence iconic too – but this is difficult to prove for a language for which we have no spoken record. If it was a salient adjective in that position, it would have provided a strong way in for the later grammaticalization of all adjectives to prenominal position, as argued above.

1 The same factors still play a role in the few cases where an adjective can still be used both pre- and postnominally in Present-day English, as in the contrast expressed between the present/responsible people and the people present/responsible. Haumann (2003: 59) also refers to the link between linearity and what she calls the semantic distinction between “individual-level adjectives, which express inherent qualities, and stage-level adjectives, which express accidental properties”, the former being attributive in nature, the latter predicative.

2 The modern compounds are not precisely comparable to the Old English preposed weak adjective + noun combination in the sense that blackbird and ladybird have lexicalized after they became a compound so that their meaning has indeed changed and narrowed. However, that is precisely what one may expect to happen when the adjective and head noun together have become one information unit, and when, in addition, the unit happens to be frequent and/or fills a lexical gap. When the unit becomes a compound, the meaning becomes semantically fixed, unlike in cases of occasional phrases such as the black bird, where the unity of the adjective and noun construction is only temporary: here, adjective and noun convey one information unit only in a particular context.

3 Instead of noun-noun compounds, Old English used mainly genitive noun-noun combinations (e.g. sunnan [GEN] leoma ‘sunlight’, or modor [GEN] tunga ‘mother tongue’, or an adjective derived from a noun, e.g. stæn+en weal ‘stone wall’. With the loss of inflexions in Middle English, many of these adjectives and genitive nouns lost their inflexions and began to behave like an adjunct to the noun. We still see remnants of this in Present-day English, cf. silk dress vs older silken dress, or gold watch vs golden watch.

4 It is well-known that nominalized adjectives in Present-day English, such as the blind, can now only refer to blind people in general and no longer to individuals, as is still possible in other Germanic languages like Dutch and German.

5 This is an oversimplified picture. It is more than likely that a number of factors worked together to produce the modern situation with respect to the adjective. These factors are: (1) the weakening of the demonstrative pronoun se, seo, þæt into a definite article and the weakening of the numeral an into an indefinite article; (2) the loss of inflections leading to the loss of the distinction between strong and weak forms; and (3) the gradual fixation of word order and the greater overall frequency of preposed adjectives with the result that that position became the preferred one (on the relation between frequency and grammaticalization, see especially Bybee and Hopper 2001, Krug 2003).

6 Note that the iconic aspect mentioned here is different from the linear or sequential iconicity referred to above. Here “stress-level (salience in regard to amplitude) bears a natural [i.e. iconic] relationship to degree of interest (discourse salience)” (Langacker 1997: 22). The effect of both types of iconicity, however, is more or less the same, it makes the adjective ‘rhematic’. Another way of conveying ‘givenness’ was by means of the new compounds mentioned in notes 3, 4 above, and in section 2.2 below.