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The Old English to-dative construction1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2014

LUDOVIC DE CUYPERE
LUDOVIC DE CUYPERE*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent, [email protected]
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Abstract

In Present-day English (PDE), the to-dative construction refers to clauses like John sold/offered/mentioned/gave the books to Mary, in which a ditransitive verb takes a Recipient that is expressed as a to-Prepositional Phrase (to-PP). This study examines the to-dative construction in Old English (OE). I show, first of all, that this construction was not rare in OE, in contrast to what has been suggested in the literature. Second, I report on two corpus studies in which I examined the ordering behaviour of the NP and the to-PP. The results of the first study suggest that the same ordering tendencies already existed in OE as in PDE: both the NP-to-PP and the to-PP-NP orders were grammatical, but the NP-to-PP was the most frequently used one. However, in OE, the to-PP-NP was more common than in PDE, where its use is heavily restricted. My second corpus study is informed by the multifactorial approach to the English dative alternation and uses a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis to evaluate the effects of various linguistic (verbal semantics, pronominality, animacy, definiteness, number, person and length) and extra-linguistic variables (translation status, time of completion/manuscript) on the ordering of NP and to-PP. The main finding is that, generally speaking, the same factors that motivate the dative alternation in PDE were involved in OE as well. No evidence was found for the influence of verbal semantics nor of the extra-linguistic variables. Finally, I argue against the view that to was semantically reanalysed from a Goal to a Recipient marker from OE to ME. Building on evidence that the Recipient use of to was already embryonically present in OE, I make the case that this semantic change was far more gradual than traditionally assumed.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 1 - 26
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

1

I wish to acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions by Cynthia Allen and Harold Koch. I am grateful to Daan Van den Nest for assisting me with the retrieval of the corpus data. I also thank Joan Bresnan for providing me with an R script to perform the cross-validation test. Finally, I am grateful to the editor and the referees for several comments and suggestions that helped to improve the article.

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