Anaphoric reference in Early Modern English

Leung, Alex and van der Wurff, Wim (2018) Anaphoric reference in Early Modern English. In: The Noun Phrase in English. John Benjamins, pp. 143-186. ISBN 9789027200723

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/la.246.06leu

Abstract

Work on the anaphoric NPs the said + N and the same has shown that both were frequent in sixteenth-century English but declined afterwards. We address the question why this happened. After reviewing earlier work on the two constructions, we present data showing that their properties and development are too dissimilar to assume that they declined for the same reason. Instead, we identify for each of the changes two separate causal factors, which involve tension between form and meaning of the anaphor. In exploring these case histories, we also offer some discussion of the general kinds of explanations that have been proposed for the decline of linguistic forms and constructions, which is an aspect of language change that deserves more systematic investigation.

Item Type: Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords: anaphoric NPs, form-meaning misfit, the decline of constructions, referential distance, Early Modern English
Subjects: Q100 Linguistics
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Depositing User: Becky Skoyles
Date Deposited: 20 Jun 2018 08:02
Last Modified: 11 Oct 2019 20:00
URI: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/34613

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