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Speech, Texts, and Choices from the Modal System: Mood Distribution in Old English Sermons

Paper · 2017 · Tanja Rütten

Summary

The paper examines how Old English chooses between two marked moods, the imperative and the subjunctive, when issuing directives in main clauses. Both moods could express commands, but their division of labour was unclear. The author tested whether this choice depends on the layer of speech being represented. Sermons suit the question because they contain two kinds of "speech": the preacher addressing the congregation directly, and the preacher relaying speech, mostly from the Bible. The study is a small, mainly qualitative pilot. It draws on Old English sermons from the Helsinki Corpus, adds material from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, and classifies each mood form by speech level. The two moods split almost cleanly along these levels. Unexpectedly, subjunctives do not cluster in reported speech. Instead they belong to the direct preacher-to-audience layer. The author argues that the Old English modal system should be described with speaker–hearer constellations and speech/writing contrasts in mind.

Key points

  • The corpus totals 57,056 words. It covers Ælfric's Catholic Homilies, Wulfstan, the Blickling and Vercelli Homilies, a homily for the sixth (fourth) Sunday after Epiphany, and anonymous sermons edited by Tristram (1970).
  • The study yields 414 imperative and subjunctive tokens, about 7 per 1,000 words, which the author says justifies a small corpus.
  • Only independent clauses were counted, since that is where the two moods overlap in function. Complement clauses after suasive and reporting verbs were left out.
  • Some forms were levelled because a post-verbal we/ȝe subject followed the verb, which hides the mood. These 11 of 414 tokens (under 3%) were excluded. Irregular verbs with defective paradigms, such as witan and don, were also excluded.
  • Wulfstan's Be Christendome was dropped because it alone supplied more than half of all third-person subjunctives. The YCOE parsed corpus is proposed for a larger follow-up study.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Each mood token is tagged with the speech layer it belongs to (direct address vs relayed speech), and that layer turns out to predict the grammatical choice.
  • I2. Plural imperatives look identical to plural indicatives, so the author first uses syntax (imperatives usually lack a subject) and then pragmatics (a directive context favours the imperative).
  • I3. One idiosyncratic text dominated a single category, so it was removed before counts were compared.
  • I4. Counting only the environments where two forms truly compete (independent clauses) keeps the comparison fair.
  • I5. The share of undecidable tokens is reported explicitly rather than silently forced into a category.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (frames): speech-act detection in prag could record whether a directive is addressed by the narrator or quoted from a character, and use that layer when interpreting who is being commanded.
  • I2 (tokens): when the tagger meets an ambiguous base form, a missing subject and a directive context could decide Mood=Imp, with the reason logged for explainability.
  • I3 (learn): evaluation and silver-data statistics could flag any single document that supplies a disproportionate share of a label, to catch skew before training.
  • I4 (learn): when measuring alternations such as imperative vs modal periphrasis, restrict the evaluation set to the contexts where both are possible, as a built-in control.
  • I5 (tree): parsers could output an explicit "unresolved" share for ambiguous morphology and report it beside LAS, instead of guessing.

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

🎓University of CologneCologne · Germany5 works · 353 citations

📚 Shelves 2 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 2 English · 1,373 works Historical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Tanja Rütten. 2017. Speech, Texts, and Choices from the Modal System: Mood Distribution in Old English Sermons. NJES: Nordic Journal of English studies 16.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.35360/njes.399

@article{rutten2017speech,
  title = {{Speech, Texts, and Choices from the Modal System: Mood Distribution in Old English Sermons}},
  author = {Tanja Rütten},
  journal = {NJES: Nordic Journal of English studies 16},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.35360/njes.399},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.35360/njes.399}
}

References

18 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Amodio, Mark C. 2014. The Anglo-Saxon Literature Handbook. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. find
  2. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. 1999. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education. find
  3. Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOEC = Dictionary of Old English Corpus; see: www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/DOEC, last access 15 September 2015. find
  4. Godden, Malcolm R. 1973. “The Development of Ælfric’s Second Series of Catholic Homilies.” English Studies 54: 209–216. find
  5. Greenfield, Stanley B. and Daniel G. Calder. 1986. A New Critical History of Old English Literature. New York: NY University Press. HC = Helsinki Corpus; see: www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus, last access 15 September 2015. find
  6. Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: University Press. ↗ our card
  7. Kohnen, Thomas. 2000. “Explicit Performatives in Old English. A Corpus-Based Study of Directives.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1(2): 301–321. find
  8. Kohnen, Thomas. 2008. “Directives in Old English: Beyond Politeness?”. Speech Acts in the History of English. Eds. Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 27–44. ↗
  9. Lass, Roger. 1994. Old English. A Historical Linguistic Companion. Cambridge: University Press. find
  10. Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: University Press. Mood distribution in Old English sermons Lenker, Ursula. 1997. Die westsächsische Evangelienversion und die Perikopenordnungen im angelsächischen England. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. ↗
  11. Lensing, Irmgard. 2010. Das Altenglische Heiligenleben. Heidelberg: Winter Liuzza, Roy M. 2001. “Religious Prose.” A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature. Eds. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne. Oxford: Blackwell. 233–250. find
  12. Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online. September 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com. ↗
  13. Quirk, Randolph and C.L. Wrenn. 1957. An Old English Grammar. Second edn. London: Methuen. find
  14. Quirk, Randolph, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik and Sidney Greenbaum. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Searle, John. find
  15. R. 1976. “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts.” Language in Society 5: 1–24. find
  16. Suter, Kurt. 1955. Das Pronomen beim Imperativ im Alt- und Mittel-englischen. Aarau: Sauerländer. find
  17. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1992. “Syntax.” The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol I. Ed. Richard M. Hogg. Cambridge: University Press. 168–289. find
  18. Tristram, Hildegard. 1970. Vier altenglische Predigten aus der heterodoxen Tradition, mit Kommentar, Übersetzung und Glossar sowie drei weiteren Texten im Anhang. Freiburg i. Br. diss. YCOE = York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose; see: www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/YCOE; last access 30 September 2015. find

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