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The Landscape of Middle English Focusing on the Adverb Even

Paper · 2022 · Olena Andrushenko

Summary

The paper traces how even became a focusing adverb during the Middle English period, and how its different senses relate to information structure and word order. The author searched a roughly 300-text collection of Middle English writings in both prose and verse (CMEPV) for even and its spelling variants. Because the corpus has no lemmas or part-of-speech tags, each hit was sorted by hand to remove adjectival, nominal and verbal homographs and non-focusing adverbial uses. The remaining focusing instances were coded for Focus type (identificational, informational, contrastive, emphatic/mirative), givenness status and clause word order. The study proposes a developmental chain: OE degree/manner adverb → ME restrictive particularizer → ME restrictive exclusive → ME scalar additive. The most common ME sense was exclusive 'just'. The modern-style scalar even mostly marks mirative, surprising content that is given or accessible in the discourse, and it tends to come with fronting of the marked element. This matters for diachronic accounts of grammaticalization and for linking focus particles to syntax.

Key points

  • Data: the simple corpus search returned 2,454 hits (forms such as eve, efne, emne, em-, geven), and only 7.8% of them were kept as focusing-adverb clauses.
  • The modern scalar sense is identified by five features: [+likelihood], [+additivity], [+scalar], [+givenness], [+surprise].
  • Scalar even stands before its target in 86.85% of tokens and occurs in surprising contexts in 89.46% of cases.
  • Constituents marked by scalar even are AdvP 81.57%, object 13.15%, subject 2.64% and verb 2.64%.
  • The two restrictive senses differ in their Focus types:
    • The particularizer favours given information, identificational Focus and SVO order.
    • The exclusive 'just' marks informational or identificational Focus, and shows XSVO inversion when it marks an emphatic AdvP.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The scalar meaning of even is defined as a bundle of features rather than a single label, and the literature review notes that the likelihood scale flips under negation (least likely becomes most likely).
  • I2. Each constituent is annotated with a givenness status (active given, situationally accessible, inferable, new) alongside its Focus type and Topic role.
  • I3. Since the corpus lacks POS tags, the form even had to be manually separated from homographic adjectives, nouns and verbs, including a possible 'evening' reading.
  • I4. A doubtful reading (euen as part of the noun phrase 'on Palm Sunday evening') is rejected because splitting that NP would be ungrammatical, since split NPs were only possible with genitives.
  • I5. A lone SXV example is flagged as possibly driven by rhythm in verse and set aside until more data exist.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): implicature rules could attach a scalar presupposition to even-marked constituents and reverse its direction when the clause is negated.
  • I2 (world): entities in the world of the text could carry a givenness state, helping decide whether a mention is new information or a reference to something already known.
  • I3 (tokens): the tagger and lemmatizer should treat even/euen as a known homograph class with explicit disambiguation cues rather than a fixed adverb.
  • I4 (tree): the parser could rule out attachments that violate known constraints on discontinuous phrases, making the choice explainable.
  • I5 (learn): induced repair rules should require multiple supporting cases and treat isolated, genre-specific patterns (e.g., verse) as unconfirmed.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Kyiv National Linguistic University.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Olena Andrushenko. 2022. The Landscape of Middle English Focusing on the Adverb Even. Litera: Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi 32.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.26650/litera2021-919486

@inproceedings{andrushenko2022landscape,
  title = {{The Landscape of Middle English Focusing on the Adverb Even}},
  author = {Olena Andrushenko},
  booktitle = {Litera: Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi 32},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.26650/litera2021-919486},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26650/litera2021-919486}
}

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