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A response to Cole

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2017

ANS VAN KEMENADE
ANS VAN KEMENADE*
Affiliation:
Radboud University Nijmegen, CLS/Dept. of English Language and Culture, Postbus 9103, 6500HD Nijmegen, The [email protected]
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Extract

Marcelle Cole presents an interesting study of pronominal reference in Old English, nicely supplementing work available in the literature which shows, in brief, that in contexts with more than one possible referent, clause-initial nominative personal pronouns dominantly continue the topic (subject) of the previous clause, whereas clause-initial se-demonstratives dominantly switch the topic to a new referent of the previous clause. Cole adds to this with a study of the overall use of clause-initial pronouns in five Old English texts, which shows more variation than expected on the basis of this literature. Her conclusion is that se-forms by and large pick up discourse-new referents from the previous context. She further claims that her findings highlight how issues pertaining to style, such as the author–writer relationship, text type, subject matter and the conventionalism propagated by text tradition, influence anaphoric strategies in Old English. In this response article. I wish to counterbalance Cole's argument on two points, and make some suggestions for further research, based on recent psycholinguistic work.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Special Issue 2: Cognitive approaches to the history of English , July 2017 , pp. 409 - 411
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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