On the distribution of OE wesan ‘be’ and weorðan ‘become’ and weorðan’s loss in ME

On the distribution of OE wesan ‘be’ and weorðan ‘become’ and weorðan’s

loss in MEPeter PetréUniversity of Leuven

Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO – Vlaanderen)

SHEL 6 – April 30–May 3, 2009Banff, AB, Canada

1

Topic• Research question:

◊ In OE, weorðan ‘become’ was highly frequent, and was used in contexts similar to wesan.

◊ Generally, weorðan is used to denote a change of state, whereas wesan can be used to do that, but can also simply denote a state

- As a copula (change of state he wearð yfel vs. state yfel wæs iudas)- As an intransitive verb (Þa wearð ceald weder vs. On frymðe wæs word)- As an auxiliary of the passive (He wearð ofslagen vs. He wæs ofslagen)

◊ In ME, weorðan decreases in frequency to disappear almost entirely by the end of the 14th century.

◊ What can account for this disappearance?• Case study: detailed analysis of the distribution between wearð and was

‘be’ (i.e., their past tenses) and what this reveals about wearð.

Introduction

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Overview• Illustration of uses and loss in ME• Assumptions: (Grammar is inherently linked to discourse-structure);• Claims: (When time adverbials are lost, strongly associated wearð is lost too) • The Corpus• Previous studies• Frequency account• Clause types and change of state• Wearð in bounded events• Bounded versus unbounded languages• Wearð and time adverbials• Inversion vs. No inversion?• Conclusion

Introduction

3

OE versus ME illustrated(1) Ða æfter feawa dagum [...] se gingra sunu [...] ferde wræclice on feorlen rice, & forspilde þar his

æhta lybbende on his gælsan. Ða he hig hæfde ealle amyrrede þa wearð mycel hunger on þam rice & he wearð wædla. [...] Þa beþohte he hine & cwæð, Eala, hu fela yrðlinga on mines fæder huse hlaf genohne habbað. [...] Ic [...] fare to minum fæder, & ic secge him, Eala fæder, [...] do me swa anne of þinum yrðlingum. & he aras þa & com to his fæder, & þa gyt þa he wæs feorr his fæder he hyne geseah & wearð mid mildheortnesse astyrod. (c1025. Lk (WSCp): 13-20)"Then after a few days ... the younger son ... traveled abroad to a far country, and wasted there his possessions living in his lusts. When he had them all wasted, then a great hunger came over the country & he became a beggar. ... Then he thought by himself and said: 'Why, how many servants in my father's house have enough bread. ... I ... will go to my father, and I will tell him: hey, father, ... take me as one of your servants. And he arose then and came to his father, and when he was still far his father saw him and was stirred by mercy."

(2) And not aftir many daies [...] the ȝonger sone wente forth in pilgrymage in to a fer cuntre; and there he wastide hise goodis in lyuynge lecherously. And aftir that he hadde endid alle thingis, a strong hungre was maad in that cuntre, and he bigan to haue nede. [...] And he turnede aȝen to hym silf, and seide, Hou many hirid men in my fadir hous han plente of looues [...]. Y schal [...] go to my fadir, and Y schal seie to hym, Fadir, [...] make me as oon of thin hirid men. 20 And he roos vp, and cam to his fadir. And whanne he was ȝit afer, his fadir saiȝ hym, and was stirrid bi mercy. ((c1384) WBible(1) (Dc 369(2): Luke 15.13-20)

Introduction

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Assumptions (1)• A separate treatment of the past tense follows from the following

assumptions on the nature of language: ◊ The primary goal of grammar is communication;◊ As such, it is not merely symbolic, it is also discourse-oriented; ◊ Grammar ultimately serves to organize information for the expression of

various types of discourse (genres);◊ Present tense and past tense do not cover the same range of discourse types;◊ In particular, the past tense in written language is frequently used for

narration of a series of events ('story-telling') (vs. the present only rarely); • The main tenet of these assumptions is shared with cognitive linguistics

(Langacker 1991), as well as recent development in acquisition literature (see Caroll & Stutterheim 2003)

Introduction

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Assumptions (2)• The language system & change are utterance-based (Croft 2000). • A grammar is a mental structure

◊ developed inductively on the basis of a finite sample of the language, namely the utterances to which the speaker has been exposed throughout her lifetime

◊ organized in a hierarchical system of 'types of utterances', or constructions , i.e. form-meaning pairings (Goldberg 1995, 2006, Croft 2001)

◊ more frequent constructions are more entrenched and time-stable. ◊ Parts of more entrenched constructions more easily stick together, like

cognitive chunks (e.g., parts of idiomatic expressions). ◊ Change is utterance-based, and therefore gradient from a holistic perspective.

Language change is not catastrophic, i.e., grammar does not (only) change between generations. Alternative grammatical constructions are therefore no either-or matter, but their probability of occurrence gradually shifts.

Introduction

6

Claims• The major mechanism at work involves a 'reverse frequency-effect':

◊ While highly entrenched constructions do not generally disappear overnight, if one slot-filler of such a construction disappears, another slot-filler can get lost too, if their collostructional strength is very high (as e.g. in idioms);

◊ Under this assumption, wearð's loss can be accounted for by the loss of a construction in which this verb was highly entrenched, namely the construction [[TimeAdverb wearð S Comp][bounded event]] (see Los 2008);

◊ The loss of this construction is itself the consequence of a change in the way discourse is structured in English;

◊ This change had an impact on the available set of constructions (grammar).[ Similar mechanisms of change have been proposed in previous work (Petré

and Cuyckens 2008), appealing to changes in the passive construction, and the loss of weak verbs in –ian. The present talk advances this research considerably in unearthing a more fundamental cause at work.]

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The Corpus• The corpus tries to enhance comparability between OE and ME by

reducing WS predominance (e.g. of Ælfric) and introducing more Anglian material in the OE part, and introducing southern-based texts in the ME part (e.g. Winteney version of Benedictine Rule) (see Petré & Cuyckens 2008).

Table 1: Corpus size of corpus used

• Sources of the corpus are: YCOE, YPC, PCME, HC, DOEC, MEC, Arngart 1968.

• The research is based on a full sample of wearð and a 10 % sample was.

951-1050 1051-1150 1151-1250 1251-1350 1421-1500 272711 118255 295473 172215 404538

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Previous studies• The distinction between wesan and weorðan is much debated. • Early philologists (e.g. Frary 1929) argued that wesan was used for

expressing resulting states or pluperfects, and weorðan for actional (or eventive) passives

• Mitchell (1985: 324) stresses that wesan too can be used in eventive passives, and that the two were basically in free variation, as in (3).

(3) (Annal 633) Her wearð Eadwine cing ofslagen, [...] (Annal 642) Her was Oswald ofslagen Norðhymbra cing. (c1107. ChronF: 633 & 642)“Here [= in this year] king Edwin was/got slain, [...] Here Oswald, king

of Northumbria was/?got slain.” • A straightforward explanation for wearð's loss would be that it was

gradually ousted by the far more frequent wesan. In this view, the 'redundant' presence of weorðan has been called the 'only false start' in the OE tense system (Wattie 1930: 143)

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Frequency account• A frequency explanation on the basis of free variation in a restricted set of

passive constructions is suspect: ◊ in the passive, the change-of-state semantics of wearð is by default less

salient, because an eventive reading could also be induced from the verbal basis of the participle (Kilpiö 1989).

◊ free variation in the passive does not explain why wearð is lost in its intransitive and copular uses too.

• Under the assumption that wearð is a single polysemous verb (sharing, in each of its uses, a basic sense of change of state), it is necessary to find clues that hold across different uses of weorðan, so that we can also account for its disappearance in these other uses.

• One way of doing this is looking at the distribution of weorðan and wesan over different types of clausal constructions.

Previous studies

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Clause types and change of state (1)The entrenchment of wearð in the expression of bounded events

Table 2: Clausal constructions co-occurring with wearð and was

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%

100%

Adjunct clause

Subordinate clause

Main clause

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Clause types and change of state (2)• Table 2 reveals:

◊ that wearð is only used in a subset of the constructions in which was is used [check pmw]: Frequency does play a part, but in a different way:

◊ the entrenchment of both verbs in particular clausal constructions seems to be a better indication than what we see in the passive construction

◊ Worth is used only very rarely in adjunct clauses. • How does this relate to the semantics of change of state of wearð?

◊ adjunct clauses are usually descriptive in nature (the man, who was tall), and so do not usually denote changes of state.

◊ past tense main clauses often express events in a narrative, and therefore will often be about changes of state.

The entrenchment of wearð in the expression of bounded events

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Wearð in bounded events (1)• Wearð is used markedly more often in clauses that express bounded

events than was, i.e. represent the situation as reaching a goal or endpoint (De Clerck 2007), and that serve to mark progress in a narrative.

◊ Example: he walked over to the other side (bounded). vs. he was walking on the street (unbounded).

→ While wearð is used in most contexts in which also wesan is found, in general wearð is much more specialized.


Table 3: wearð

Table 4: was

951-1050 1151-1250 1251-1350

951-1050 1151-1250 1251-1350

Bounded event 243 99 41

Bounded event 43 32 26 Other 35 2 0

Other 120 95 38

Total 288 101 41

Total 163 127 74

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Wearð in bounded events (2)• This high co-occurrence immediately compromises the frequency account:

◊ If an item is used in expressions for particular meanings far more exclusively than its (more versatile) alternative, it is a good predictor in determining this overall sentence meaning;

◊ This makes it into the preferred alternative for the expression of that particular meaning (see e.g. findings in Goldberg 2006);

◊ Wearð is a good predictor of the clause expressing a bounded event;◊ Because of this, wearð might as well have taken over the use of was in the

expression of bounded events (instead of being ousted due to lower frequency);

◊ This is exactly what seems to have happened in German and Dutch. • Why is English different?


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Bounded vs. unbounded (1)• The absence vs. presence of weorðan can be tied to what is called the

difference between unbounded and bounded (Carroll & Stutterheim 2003, Carroll & Lambert 2003)

◊ Bounded (German, 4a): within a discourse sequence, the topic is reset to a local spatial or temporal anchor with every new discourse move (Auf einmal, dann), using the first main clause constituent position to establish topic time (Klein 1994). Speakers of German thus break up a sequence of events into bounded segments.

◊ Unbounded (English, 4b): in a rigid subject-initial syntax, events are encoded as initially anchored to some point in time which is maintained throughout the event. The event itself is described in unbounded terms by means of progressive aspect (hearing, digging, caving in). Topic time implicitly remains the same throughout.


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Bounded vs. unbounded (2)

(4)a. b.Auf einmal hört der Mann Wasser tropfen The man is hearing the sound of dripping water Und dann gräbt er nach dem Wasser and he is digging for the water Bis der Sand dann unter ihm nachgibt and the sand is caving in under him

• Where speakers of unbounded languages opt for a progressive form in their descriptions, as in English (4b), speakers of bounded languages like German prefer anchoring in space and time, and particularly frequently with temporal adverbs like dann in (4a); their language may well lack an expression for the progressive altogether.


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Bounded vs. unbounded (3)• OE was, like modern German, a bounded language.

◊ OE has no progressive;◊ OE makes abundant use of time adverbials to establish topic time;◊ Just like German dann, one time adverbial, þa, is particularly frequent, and

very often is found in the first main clause constituent position, thus causing Subject-Verb inversion.


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Bounded vs. unbounded (4)• The bible fragment in (1') nicely illustrates the bounded status of OE

(1') Ða æfter feawa dagum [...] se gingra sunu [...] ferde wræclice on feorlen rice, & forspilde þar his æhta lybbende on his gælsan. Ða he hig hæfde ealle amyrrede þa wearð mycel hunger on þam rice & he wearð wædla. [...] Þa beþohte he hine & cwæð, Eala, hu fela yrðlinga on mines fæder huse hlaf genohne habbað. [...] Ic [...] fare to minum fæder, & ic secge him, Eala fæder, [...] do me swa anne of þinum yrðlingum. & he aras þa & com to his fæder, & þa gyt þa he wæs feorr his fæder he hyne geseah & wearð mid mildheortnesse astyrod. (c1025. Lk (WSCp): 13-20)

"Then after a few days ... the younger son ... traveled abroad to a far country, and wasted there his possessions living in his lusts. When he had them all wasted, then a great hunger came over the country & he became a beggar. ... Then he thought by himself and said: 'Why, how many servants in my father's house have enough bread. ... I ... will go to my father, and I will tell him: hey, father, ... take me as one of your servants. And he arose then and came to his father, and when he was still far his father saw him and was stirred by mercy."


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Bounded vs. unbounded (5)• In ongoing research, van Kemenade, Los & Starren (2008) argue that

English only becomes a fully fledged unbounded language only in Early Modern English, with the development of the progressive develops.


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Bounded vs. unbounded (6)• However, the ME bible fragment provides indications that this shift was

already taking place during ME, and had an immediate impact on wearð(i) The replacement of wearð wædla 'became a beggar' by began to have need.

Open-ended inchoative constructions (start/begin to do X) are typical for unbounded systems, and provide a topic time or setting that holds throughout the occurrence of subsequent events (Carroll & Stutterheim 2003: 384).

(ii) Topic time is no longer as consistently specified for each event at clause level, and þa is entirely absent already in this late ME version

(2') And not aftir many daies [...] the ȝonger sone wente forth in pilgrymage in to a fer cuntre; and there he wastide hise goodis in lyuynge lecherously. And aftir that he hadde endid alle thingis, a strong hungre was maad in that cuntre, and he bigan to haue nede. [...] And he turnede aȝen to hym silf, and seide, Hou many hirid men in my fadir hous han plente of looues [...]. Y schal [...] go to my fadir, and Y schal seie to hym, Fadir, [...] make me as oon of thin hirid men. 20 And he roos vp, and cam to his fadir. And whanne he was ȝit afer, his fadir saiȝ hym, and was stirrid bi mercy. ((c1384) WBible(1) (Dc 369(2): Luke 15.13-20)


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Wearð and time adverbials (1)• If English was already shifting into an unbounded system during ME,

wearð's strong association with bounded events might have brought about its disappearance, when bounded events decreased in narratives.

• More specifically, wearð seems to be not only semantically strongly tied to boundedness, but also in terms of its constructional entrenchment.

• In particular, it is strongly associated with precisely those time adverbials that set topic time in a bounded language (then, after that, on that day...)

• The stronger association of wearð with these time adverbials than that of was can be shown by a distinctive collexeme analysis, a method for investigating differences between two near-equivalent constructions, i.e. for

“the analysis of alternating pairs of constructions and their relative preferences for words that can (or should be able to) occur in both of them” (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004: 101)


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Wearð and time adverbials (2)The entrenchment of wearð in the expression of bounded events

(Indicative preterite; all collexemes distinctive at p < 0.05)

Table 1: 951-105 Wearð CollStr Was CollStr IMMEDIATELY 4.29 NoAdverbial 7.89 AFTER_X 4.26 STILL 2.43 THO 4.14 ALWAYS 1.94 NOW 3.92 THEN 1.63 WITHIN_PERIOD 2.94 ERE 1.37 AGAIN 2.19

(N of [Time Adverbials co-occurring with]

Worth = 315; N of Was = 268 [> 2680])

Table 2: 1151-1250 Wearð CollStr Was CollStr IMMEDIATELY 10.56 NoAdverbial 8.65 THO 6.07 ERE 1.48 ON_TIME 1.59

NOW 1.39 WITHIN_PERIOD 1.39

(N of [Time Adverbials co-occurring with]

Worth = 112; N of Was = 262 [> 2620]) Table 3: 1251-1350

Wearð CollStr Was CollStr THO 9.76 NoAdverbial 3.20 WHILE_X_V-ed 1.49

WITHIN_PERIOD 1.49

(N of [Time Adverbials co-occurring with] Wearð = 42; N of Wæs = 126 [> 1260])

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Wearð and time adverbials (3)The entrenchment of wearð in the expression of bounded events

• The analysis reveals that there is a strong collostructional strength between wearð and time adverbials specifying topic time.

• Note that the collostructional strength with a particular type of time adverbial increases as its overall frequency decreases :

• In general, these types of time adverbials all drastically decrease during early and late ME (on þa: van Kemenade & Los 2006; Westergaard 2009).

→ The fate of wearð is tied up with the fate of adverbials of time. When these are lost during the shift into an unbounded system, wearð is lost with them.

per thousand preterite copulasIMMEDIATELY 31.5 17.2 16.1AFTER_X 24.3 27.8 7.7THO 154.2 48.3 33.8

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Wearð and time adverbials (4)• This holds across all uses of wearð, not just the passive ones:

(2') [gives examples of intransitive, passive and copular (+NP) wearð; (5) (OE). & hælend […] cweþ dohter, […] geleafa þin þec halne dyde & warð ða hal þæt wif of þære hwile. (MtGl (Ru) 9: 22)

(ME). And Jhesus […] seide, Douytir, […] thi feith hath maad thee saaf. And the womman was hool fro that our. (a1425(c1395) WBible(2), Mt 9: 22)

“And Jesus [...] said: ‘Daughter, […] your faith has made you safe. And the woman was cured from that hour on.”cf. At Iesus [...] dixit 'confide filia fides tua te salvam fecit' et salva facta est mulier ex illa hora (Vulgate, Mt 9: 22)


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Inversion vs. No inversion? (1)• Is the shift entirely semantic?• Note that the time-adverbials with which wearð is so strongly associated

often take the first position in the clause, causing the subject to be inverted:

(6) Heo hine freclice bat. Ða wearð heo sona fram deofle gegripen. (c1025. GD 1 [C]: 4.31.1)

“She beat him heavily. Then she was/got suddenly taken by the devil.”• One might deduce from this that the loss of wearð, then, is perhaps not so

much brought about by a shift in the way discourse was structured, but that it is due to a purely syntactic shift to SVO, with loss of structures featuring Subject-inversion.

Alternative syntactic hypothesis

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Inversion vs. No inversion? (2)• However, a close look at the distribution of inverted vs. non-inverted main

clause structures between wearð and was seems to rule out a purely syntactic account:

Alternative syntactic hypothesis

Table 4: 951-1050

Table 5: 1151-1250

Wearð Was

Wearð Was

No inversion 112 82

No inversion 44 83 Inversion 73 76

Inversion 33 41

P = 0.067 (probability for smaller number of non-inverted wearð)


(Subjectless sentences left out: 19/5)


Table 6: 1251-1350

Wearð Was

No inversion 27 51

Inversion 10 20



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Conclusion• The loss of the function word wearð cannot be explained along the same

lines as when a content word is lost;• Instead, the loss of wearð can be linked to its entrenchment in the

'bounded event'-construction, itself part of a bounded language system; • This construction (or clause type) features a set of time adverbials setting

topic time relative to which the event is situated;• When the bounded language system is gradually shifting into an

unbounded systeym, these time adverbials also disappear (or decrease drastically);

• Due to the high collostructional strength of wearð and these time-adverbials, wearð is lost too.

• The loss of wearð accounts for about half of the uses of weorðan. In the future, the present tense and subjunctive mood of wearð has to be looked into.

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Klein, W. 1994. Time in Language. London: Routledge. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Concept, image, and symbol: the cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Los, Bettelou. Syntax and Information Structure in Interaction: The Loss of Verb-Second in English and its Consequences.

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Gotti, M. Dossena & R. Dury (eds.) English historical linguistics 2006. Volume I Historical syntax and morphology. Selected papers from the fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21-25 August 2006. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 24-48.

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progressive in early Modern English can tell us about the causes of typological shift. www.ru.nl/aspx/download.aspx?File=contents/pages/309843/aioplaats2008sep23.doc&structuur=engels

Wattie, J.M. 1930. Tense. English Studies 16. 121-143. YCOE: The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. 2003. Ann Taylor et al. York: Department of Language

and Linguistic Science. YPC: York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry. 2001. Susan Pintzuk and Leendert Plug. York: Linguistics

Department.

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Contact informationPeter PetreDepartment of LinguisticsUniversity of LeuvenBlijde-Inkomststraat 21B-3000 Leuven, BelgiumEmail: [email protected] http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/fll

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Documents

On the distribution of OE wesan ‘be’ and weorðan ‘become’ and weorðan’s loss in ME