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Stylistic Fronting in the Ormulum - Scandinavian Syntactic Phenomena in Early Middle English Texts

Paper · 2004 · Carola Trips

Summary

The paper asks whether Scandinavian contact left syntactic traces in northern Early Middle English, and not just borrowed vocabulary. Its test case is the Ormulum, an unrhymed but strictly metrical poem written around 1200 in Lincolnshire, inside the Danelaw. The text is part of PPCME2. The author first lists Norse-derived words and grammatical forms in the poem, such as third-person plural pronouns, arrt, and till meaning "to". She then counts candidate cases of stylistic fronting, a Scandinavian operation that moves a participle, adjective, adverb, negation or particle into an embedded clause that lacks a subject.

The fronting is much more frequent when a subject gap licenses it than when the clause has a full subject. A second, Old-Swedish-like variant also appears with pronoun subjects. A metrical analysis shows that Orm used the optional fronting to fit his iambic line. This supports Holmberg's (2000) view of stylistic fronting as a PF (phonological) operation, and Kroch & Taylor's (1997) claim of Scandinavian influence on northern English.

Key points

  • Data: the Ormulum (c. 1200, Lincolnshire) from the Penn-Helsinki-Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2). Examples are cited by CMORM identifiers.
  • In clauses with a subject gap, fronting occurs about 47% of the time and is absent about 52% of the time, so the operation is optional.
  • The contrast with full subject DPs is sharp: past participles are fronted 43% of the time with a gap, but only 6% with a full subject. The author explains the residual cases with full subjects by other means: rare Infl-final order, adverb mobility, and nohht acting as a sentence adverb.
  • With pronominal subjects, fronting occurs 24% of the time and is absent 76% of the time. This is a second type of fronting, paralleling Platzack (1988) on Old Swedish.
  • The metre imposes two constraints:
    • In a relative clause where a monosyllabic auxiliary meets a two-syllable participle, fronting is obligatory, because participle endings may not fall on an ictus.
    • The fourth ictus of the first half-line must hold a monosyllable.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The author checks whether a construction label is real by comparing its rate where it is licensed (subject gap) with where it should be impossible (full subject DP); the gap between the two rates is the evidence.
  • I2. The residual hits in the control environment are not ignored; each is assigned an independent explanation (old verb-final order, free adverb placement, sentence-adverb negation).
  • I3. Word order is treated as optional in syntax but chosen by an outside constraint (metre), so variation is predictable once that constraint is known.
  • I4. A licensed movement leaves recognisable surface signatures: a participle or adjective placed before the finite verb, inside a relative clause whose subject has been extracted.
  • I5. Evidence is stacked by level: borrowed words and morphology come first, then the question of whether syntax shows the same contact.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): Any rule-induced or silver-annotated construction could be validated this way, using the "impossible" environment as a negative control whose hit rate estimates the false-positive level.
  • I2 (learn): When evaluating repair rules, the residue in the control set could be sorted into named alternative causes, rather than counted as plain noise.
  • I3 (back): The generator could keep grammar-licensed order alternatives open and choose among them using a separate scorer, such as rhythm or style, while logging which constraint made the choice.
  • I4 (tree): The parser and treebank checks for older or poetic English should not read this order as a sign of a missing subject. They could use the subject gap as the cue for attaching the fronted element to its usual head.
  • I5 (world): In the compiled knowledge layer, register or dialect hypotheses about a text could be built in the same way, letting lexical cues raise the prior for an unusual syntactic reading.

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 StuttgartStuttgart · Germany91 works · 46,376 citations

 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 Carola Trips. 2004. Stylistic Fronting in the Ormulum - Scandinavian Syntactic Phenomena in Early Middle English Texts. Nordlyd: Tromsø University Working Papers on Language & Linguistics 31.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.7557/12.15

@inproceedings{trips2004stylistic,
  title = {{Stylistic Fronting in the Ormulum - Scandinavian Syntactic Phenomena in Early Middle English Texts}},
  author = {Carola Trips},
  booktitle = {Nordlyd: Tromsø University Working Papers on Language \& Linguistics 31},
  year = {2004},
  doi = {10.7557/12.15},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7557/12.15}
}

References

22 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  2. Falk, Cecilia. 1993. Non-Referential Subjects in the History of Swedish, Doctoral dissertation, University of Lund. find
  3. Holmberg, Anders. 1997. ‘Scandinavian Stylistic Fronting: Movement of Phonological Features in the Syntax,’ Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 60, 81-124. find
  4. Holmberg, Anders. 2000. ‘Scandinavian Stylistic Fronting: How any category can become expletive,’ Linguistic Inquiry 31, 445-483. find
  5. Holmberg, A. and Platzack, C. 1995. The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax, Oxford University Press, Oxford. ↗
  6. Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli. 1991. ‘Stylistic Fronting in Icelandic,’ Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 48, 1-45. find
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  18. Platzack, Christer. 1988. ‘The Emergence of a Word Order Difference in Scandinavian Subordinate Clauses,’ in D. Fekete and Z. Laubitz (eds.), McGill Working Papers in Linguistics, Special Issue on Comparative Germanic Syntax, Mc Gill University, Montréal, pp. 215-238. find
  19. Rögnvaldsson, E. and Thráinsson, H. 1990. ‘On Icelandic Word Order Once More,’ in Modern Icelandic Syntax. Syntax and Semantics 24, J. Maling and A. Zaenen (eds), Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 3-40. ↗
  20. Trips, C. 1999. ‘Scandinavian Characteristics in the Ormulum: Evidence for Scandinavian influence on the word order change in Early Middle English,’ Proceedings of Console 8, 327-342. find
  21. Trips, Carola. 2001. The OV/VO Word Order Change in Early Middle English. Evidence for Scandinavian Influence on the English Language, Doctoral dissertation, University of Stuttgart. Trips, Carola. (to appear). From OV to VO in Early Middle English, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. ↗
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