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und zum Druck besorgt von Walter Matzkow und Kurt Aland.
Kemmerer, David
2005 The Spatial and Temporal Meanings of English Prepositions
Can Be Independently Impaired. Neuropsychologia 43: 797806.
Levinson, Stephen C.
2003 Space in Language and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Luraghi, Silvia
2003 On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases: the Expression of
Semantic Roles in Ancient Greek. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Rudanko, Juhani
1995 Balking at and Working at: On Verb Governing at -ing in
Present-day English. English Studies 3: 264281.
Segen, Bazyl
2001 Prynazounik u Sisteme Adnoj Usxodneslavjanskaj Gavorki Belas-
tochchyny. Belastok.
Tyler, Andrea, and Vivian Evans
2003 The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied
Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tyler, Andrea, and Vivian Evans
2001 Reconsidering Prepositional Polysemy Networks: The Case of
Over. Language 77, No. 4: 724765.
Van der Zee, Emile and Jon Slack (eds.)
2003 Representing Direction in Language and Space. Oxford: Univer-
sity Press.
80 Olga Thomason
Commentary on Thomason, Notion of Direction and
Old English Prepositional Phrases
Joanna Nykiel
This paper suggests a wider landscape in which to locate Thomasons dis-
cussion of English prepositional phrases (PPs). Thomason points out that
there has been little work on the semantics of PPs beyond present-day
English. Her data are intended to redress this imbalance by oering insight
into the phrases expressing direction in the Old English (OE) period. The
study shows that the traditional correlation between the accusative case
and the sense of direction does not always apply in OE. The accusative
may in fact carry a location meaning when in a construction with preposi-
tion wi. Further, the dative, normally associated with location, is also
found in phrases that denote direction. This eect is strongest in sequences
headed by preposition to#, where the accusative is an option too, though a
notably less frequent one.
Assuming that it is possible to identify OE cases by nominal suxes, it
would have been helpful to see numerical data along with a chronological
organization of the results. Allen (1995) and more recently Krygier (2002)
have argued that the case system breaks down already in OE, sometimes
leaving the dative and accusative forms identical. The data seem particu-
larly dubious to me where one relies on nal -e as an indicator of the
dative because it might just as well be the accusative, as is the case with
strong feminine nouns, e.g., cwalu in example (1). The inclusion of the
temporal factor in particular would have imparted more precision to
Thomasons ndings and helped warrant a more detailed analysis of
them. Suggesting an approach is, inasmuch as the results allow it, my pur-
pose in what follows. Thomasons data raise two general issues: repeated
use leading to entrenchment and a possible t of the data with the con-
structional framework. I address them in this order.
I nd it indeed puzzling that the distribution of cases is so variable
across phrases. But perhaps there is an explanation for the variety. Central
to Thomasons discussion is the contrast between the behavior of Ps in, on,
binnan, innan and ofer on the one hand and that of to#, wi, onge#an and
to#ge#an on the other. She notes that the former set selects the dative for
location and the accusative for direction in the context of containment and
surface. The latter set appears to somewhat randomly select the dative or
accusative with respect to both direction and location. Part of the explana-
tion may lie in frequency of occurrence, to which I now turn.
It has been recognized that grammar is shaped by speakers linguistic
experience: strings of words experienced more often will have stronger
mental representations than those that are only sporadically encountered.
This recognition is formalized in usage-based models with an emphasis
on how particular exemplars may guide semantic change (Barlow and
Kemmer 2000, Langacker 2000, Bybee 2001, 2006). Because speakers are
believed to keep a mental record of all the contexts associated with a given
string, that strings representation is variable to the extent that it may
accommodate new contexts and meanings or lose previous ones if they
become too infrequent. It could be that the division of labor between
the dative and accusative in surface/containment contexts arose through
repetition (entrenchment); if there was prior variation, it might have been
eliminated due to insucient frequency.
With respect to other contexts, Thomason argues that directional uses
of the dative may be supported by aspects of the string it is part of: the
semantics of the verb or that of the governing preposition. For exam-
ple, motion verbs impose a direction meaning on the following PP. If the
preposition is to#, a direction meaning receives additional support. But the
sequence to# dative can indicate location and source as well are these
its basic meanings? It is possible that the meaning of direction was inferred
for to# dative and added to its representation as a result of frequent use
with motion verbs. The accusative could then be the case originally asso-
ciated with direction, and continue to be used so, presumably at a rate
that still allows it to exist as an alternative. The preference for the string
to# dative with the meaning of direction, however, does not yet solve the
issue of whether to# accusative antedates it, leading to a later extension
to the dative, or whether the reverse is true, or whether both phrases oc-
curred in parallel. What would help us decide between these scenarios is
considering the temporal factor because a rise in frequency may often
reect a new use developing out of an earlier one, pushing it into a second-
ary role (see, for example, Bybee (2006) on the development of the be
going to construction).
Whatever the scenario, it emerges for the data that directional mean-
ings are best taken to derive from accessing an entire verb phrase as a
unit and not as individual constituents, which enables a constructional
treatment in the sense of Croft (2001), Goldberg (2006) and De Smet and
82 Joanna Nykiel
Cuyckens (2007). In the formalism of construction grammar, strings form
micro-constructions (individual construction-types) based on their con-
texts of use; these may then align to form higher-level structures: meso-
and macro-constructions (Traugott 2008a,b, Trousdale 2008). OE may
have seen formations along these lines. As long as the accusative is
selected, a directional meaning is arguably constructed out of the con-
stituents of a verb phrase; an extension to the dative, though, signals a
partial loss of constituent transparency. If this were the case (cf. rst
scenario), a micro- (or meso-) construction formed in OE. In fact, such a
construction would have formed even if the second and third scenarios
turned out to be true, only it must have formed prior to OE. It would be
interesting to know whether Old English PPs may be recast as part of
direction (or location) constructions. This possibility would bring a
solution to the otherwise puzzling variation.
References
Allen, Cynthia
1995 Case-Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old
to Early Modern English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Barlow, Michael, and Suzanne Kemmer, eds.
2000 Usage-based Models of Language. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publica-
tions.
Bybee, Joan
2006 From Usage to Grammar: The Minds Response to Repetition.
Language 82(4): 711733.
Bybee, Joan
2001 Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Croft, William
2001 Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological
Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Smet, Hendrik, and Hubert Cuyckens
2007 Diachronic Aspects of Complementation: Constructions, En-
trenchment, and the Matching Problem. In Studies in the History
of the English Language III: Managing Chaos: Strategies for
Identifying Change in English, edited by Christopher M. Cain
and Georey Russom, 187213. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Goldberg. Adele
2006 Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Lan-
guage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Commentary on Thomason 83
Krygier, Marcin
2002 A Re-classication of Old English Nouns. Studia Anglica Posna-
niensia 38: 311319.
Langacker, Ronald
2000 Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2008a All that he endeavoured to prove was: On the Emergence of
Grammatical Constructions in Dialogual and Dialogic Contexts.
In Language in Flux. Dialogue Coordination, Language Varia-
tion, Change and Evolution Volume 1, edited by Robin Cooper
and Ruth Kempson. London: College Publications.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2008b Grammaticalization, Constructions and the Incremental De-
velopment of Language: Suggestions from the Development of
Degree Modiers in English. In Variation, Selection, Develop-
ment. Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Change,
edited by Gerhard Jaeger, 219250. Berlin/New York: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Trousdale, Graeme
2008 Constructions in Grammaticalization and Lexicalization: Evi-
dence from the History of a Composite Predicate Construction
in English. In Constructional Approaches to English Grammar,
edited by Graeme Trousdale and Nikolas Gisborne, 3367.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
84 Joanna Nykiel
Response to Commentary by Nykiel
Olga Thomason
Nykiel oers a thorough and insightful commentary to the article. This
response is organized around the main points which were brought up in
her discussion. The rst argument is connected with the syncretism of the
case system in Old English and grammatical and semantic ambiguity of
words (like strong feminine nouns) that have identical forms in the dative
and accusative. This argument is reasonable, however, not all nominals
have lost their distinctions in these cases (see example (2)), and some pre-
serve it in plural even though they lost it in singular (like strong feminine
nouns). Preserved dative/accusative distinction in third-person singular
pronouns (example (1)) and demonstrative pronouns makes the posited
problem even more tangible (example (2)). Thus, it is still plausible to
talk about the designation of direction by to# Dat.
Answering Nykiels question about the basic meaning of to# Dat, we
would like to stress that it is precisely the fact the basic meaning of
to# Dat is direction (and not location or source, which this construction
also marks albeit less frequently) that initially triggered this study. This
meaning could be a result of frequent use with motion verbs (as suggested
by the reviewer and mentioned in the article). It could also be due to the
case syncretism and broadening of semantic range of the Old English
dative (see the discussion in the article). However, the opinion is main-
tained that the denotation of direction is inherent to the semantics of to#
since there is an abundance of Indo-European cognates of this preposition
that retain the directional value (see examples in the article).
It is agreed that any semantic analysis should be derived from an entire
construction including its verbal and nominal components (as we hoped to
show in the article). However, we are not eager to treat them as a one-way
relationship where a verbal head dictates the choice of a preposition and a
preposition, in turn, rules the selection of case. The relationship is much
more complex. There are instances where the semantics of a preposition
has a decisive value (directional usages of to# Dat, in our view) and ex-
amples where it is the meaning of a motion verb that prevails (directional
usages of wi Dat). The role of the accusative case whose primary func-
tions are connected with the designation of direction are exemplied by
means that are used in Old English to express the meanings into
(in Acc, on Acc, binnan Acc, innan Acc) and onto (on Acc,
ofer Acc). In addition, one has to keep check with conceptional spe-
cics. In our case the notion of direction is connected with the concepts
of proximity and opposition as exemplied by the Old English data. This
cognitive complexity adds to the level of variation found in Old English
texts.
Nykiels perceptive suggestion to present a chronological organization
and statistical analysis of the data anticipates the next step of our research,
which intends to add a diachronic spin to a currently primarily synchronic
study and hopes to mark the exact course and stages of semantic develop-
ment of prepositional phrases denoting direction in Old English. This, of
course, should make possible the explanation of the distinction between
direction and location usages with the help of the frequency of occurrence
suggested by the reviewer.
86 Olga Thomason
Survival of the Strongest: Strong Verb Inection
from Old to Modern English
Sherrylyn Branchaw
Old English had a relatively robust system of strong verbs, 367 that the
extant corpus allows us to count. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
the system began to break down in a serious way, leaving us in Modern
English with 72 of these inected as purely weak and 78 inected with at
least some strong forms.
1
The forces behind the weakening process have
been treated in detail by Marcin Krygier (1994) among others; the ques-
tion I address here is why those specic 78 verbs, and not others, remained
strong to the present day. Because the eleventh century, immediately pre-
ceding the breakdown, is one of the worst-attested periods in English his-
tory, I nd it most useful to look at the verb system of Old English to see
what factors already present then allowed certain verbs to resist the regu-
larizing tendencies of Middle English. Where the Old English data are
insucient to explain the modern outcome of a verb, I examine the state
of the language at the relevant later period.
Since the weakening process is still ongoing, the status of some verbs in
the present day is uncertain. For example, dive has as a preterite only dove
for some speakers, only dived for other speakers, and variation for other
speakers. I have, therefore, included three categories in dening the
modern outcome of a verb: strong, weak, and uncertain. With the under-
standing that usage will vary slightly from speaker to speaker, assignment
of verbs to the categories has proceeded according to my own usage,
which is American and is rather conservative, retaining e.g., sank, trod,
and throve.
The major factors I examine are type frequency, by which I mean the
number of verbs with the same ablaut pattern; token frequency, by which
I mean the number of occurrences of that specic verb in the Old English
corpus; the shape of the root, not including the vowel; and the eciency of
the ablaut pattern in making distinctions among principal parts.
1. I count using the list in Quirk et al. (1985).
A cautionary note on token frequency: due to the nature of the searches
I was able to perform on the online Dictionary of Old English Corpus,
these numbers should be viewed as ballpark gures only, and no statistical
analysis should be attempted on them. They are solely for the purpose of
determining which verbs were more or less common than others, not how
much more or less common. Further research will be done to obtain
gures with higher accuracy and precision so that more detailed conclu-
sions can be drawn.
For some forms, I was unable to obtain even ballpark gures in the
time available due to homography with much more common words, such
as the past tense of etan, t, meaning ate, and the far more common
preposition t, meaning at. These forms simply have no number beside
them in the tables. The absence of any number is to be distinguished
from the presence of a 0 in the following way: no number means that the
search was unsuccessful due to homography. A 0 means that a search was
successfully carried out, and no instances of the form in question were
found.
The size of the data set can be reduced somewhat by eliminating a
group of certain infrequent verbs in the following manner. Looking at
Table 1, I dene a fully attested verb as one for which the vocalism of
each of its four principal parts is attested in Old English, according to the
compilation of data in Krygier (1994), with modern surviving verbs
checked using a search on the electronic corpus. In the rst row, Old
English had 367 strong verbs, of which 224 were fully attested, which
Table 1
# verbs # fully
attested
% fully
attested
Old English strong 367 224 61
Modern English descendants 150 120 81
MdE weak 72 52 72
MdE strong 62 55 89
MdE uncertain 16 13 81
MdE at least some strong
(uncertain strong)
78 68 87
88 Sherrylyn Branchaw
comes to 61%. Of those 367 verbs, 150 survive in Modern English, and
120 of those, or 80%, were fully attested in Old English. Of those 150 sur-
viving verbs, 72 are now inected as weak, and 62 as strong. Of those 62
strong verbs, 89% were fully attested in Old English.
If we assume a correlation between fully attested and frequent, we
can conclude that in the very broadest sense, the frequency of the verb
was a signicant factor not only in determining its lexical fate in the
language in other words, whether the word survived at all but also in
determining the survival of its strong inection.
My conclusion is therefore that any verb not fully attested, if it survives
at all, will survive as weak, unless special conditions prevail, namely that it
can be easily t into one of the most productive strong patterns, as in the
case of slink. Therefore, I reduce the set of verbs I am considering to the
fully attested verbs as well as to those handful of surviving strong verbs
that were not fully attested. To investigate the eects of type frequency, I
sorted these verbs into groups with identical ablaut. I refer to these groups
as series to avoid confusion with the traditional grouping into classes.
The tables in this paper are grouped in series according to Old English
type frequency, from highest to lowest, with some mergers I will talk
about. The rst column contains the modern descendant of the Old
English verb, which may or may not have the same meaning, and the sec-
ond through fth columns contain the four principal parts innitive,
preterite rst and third singular, preterite plural and second singular, and
past participle along with the ballpark token frequency counts of each
form where obtainable from the corpus search.
For the rst two series, I have given only lists for the outcomes of
verbs, which seemed the most ecient method of presentation given the
minimal impact of token frequency and the large number of surviving
verbs. Including each verb on a table line would have added very little
information in a great deal of space.
The Old English type frequencies are given in parentheses in the head-
ing of each series, e.g., Series I (28). Modern English verbs that are
italicized were not fully attested in Old English but survive as strong
nonetheless.
Series I (28)
Strong: bind, drink, nd, grind, begin, run, shrink, spring, spin, sting, sing,
sink, swim, swing, wind, win, wring, stink, cling, slink
Weak: burn, climb
Survival of the Strongest 89
Series II (28)
Strong: bite, drive, ride, rise, shrive, smite, write, shine, stride, strike
(transferred to Series I)
Weak: glide, gripe, slide, writhe
Uncertain: bide, shit, cleave
Series III (26)
Table 2. Strong Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
y
1
e# ogan 63 e# ah 190 ugon 118 ogen 13
choose ce# osan 42 ce# as 322 curon 79 coren 859
freeze fre# osan 2 fre# as 2 fruron 4 froren 6
shoot sce# otan 30 sce# at scuton 19 scoten 31
1
Three principal parts of y and ee are identical.
Table 3. Weak Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
chew ce# owan 8 ce# aw 5 cuwon 2 cowen 5
creep cre# opan 3 cre# ap 5 crupon 5 cropen 6
ee
2
e# on 229 e# ah 190 ugon 118 ogen 13
lie le# ogan 19 le# ah 12 lugon 27 logen 19
reek re# ocan 14 re# ac 2 rucon 0 rocen 1
seethe se# oan 3 se# a 4 sudon 4 soden 162
2
No gures were obtainable for mete due to excessive homophony.
From the rst three series, it emerges that type frequency was not the most
important factor. Here we have three series with nearly identical frequency
counts, yet the percentage of verbs surviving as strong is dramatically
lower for Series III. To explain this phenomenon, we must remember that
the nature of the strong verb is to indicate grammatical changes through a
change in the root vowel. If the vowels in the principal parts of a verb are
not easily distinguishable from one another, then the grammatical changes
90 Sherrylyn Branchaw
are indicated only weakly and, from a perceptual point of view, such an
ablaut pattern will be disfavored.
The robustness of the ablaut pattern correlates well with the outcomes
of the rst three series. [i]P[a]P[u], the well-known vowel triangle, are
maximally distinct and [i:]P[a:]P[i] moderately so. In Series III, however,
[eo] spelled <e# o> and [a] spelled <e# a> underwent a near merger in early
Middle English to [e:] and [:] (Lass 1992: 4245) and in some dialects had
become homophonous already in Old English. Because [e:] and [:] are so
similar to each other, as a pair they do a poor job of distinguishing a past
tense from a present. I conclude that Series III verbs were more susceptible
to the use of the dental preterite than they would have been had the two
vowels been more distinct from each other. Taking into account this
greater (relative to Series I and II) tendency to become weak, the verbs
from Series III survive as weak or strong according to their relative token
frequency in Old English, in general. I must leave freeze, with its low
token frequency, for further research.
At least three pieces of evidence make it clear that root shape had some
impact in Series I. Series I had a high survival rate of verbs without fully
attested vocalism in Old English, such as stink, cling, and slink. As men-
tioned above, when the concept of fully attested was introduced, verbs
not fully attested in English continued as strong to the present day only if
they could be t into a very productive series such as this one. Further-
more, both denominal verbs such as ring and string and Norse verbs such
as ing were transferred into this series in Middle English.
By the sixteenth century (OED), a critical mass had been reached, and
the nal velar became the most salient part of the root without requiring
the presence of a nasal. An initial consonant cluster, especially one begin-
ning with [s], was helpful but not necessary.
Evidence for the importance of the velar in dening this series is found
in the reassignment of certain verbs into this category (Bybee 2001: 126).
The verbs stick and dig ought to be weak, but because of their nal velars,
they became conjugated like slink in Middle English even though they had
no nasal. Similarly, strike ought to be conjugated strikePstrokePstricken
but because of its nal velar was susceptible to being conjugated strikeP
struck. In the case of stick and strike, the consonant cluster beginning with
[s] made them even more similar to many verbs in this series, and thus
they transferred more easily. From strike especially we see the importance
of root shape since the word properly belongs to Series II, which has
always had relatively high type frequency, and the vowel of strike does
not even match the usual vowel of Series I, which is [I]. In a product-
Survival of the Strongest 91
oriented schema, this mismatch is not as surprising as it might be in other
theories because inputs need not be identical in form. So if the present
form allows for the creation of a preterite that follows the type of Series
I, the dierences in the vowels are not problematic. In Modern English,
Bybee points out that the eects of the root shape are felt even more
strongly, as seen in the nonstandard preterites snuck and drug of sneak
and drag, respectively (2001: 126).
Table 4 shows the factors that inuenced the outcome of verbs in the
rst three series. Series I was favored by high type frequency, optimal
vowel distinctness, and easily denable root shape, and accordingly it has
the largest percentage of verbs surviving as strong. Series II was favored
by type frequency and by vowel distinctness, and accordingly it has a
lower percentage of verbs surviving as strong compared to Series I but
relatively high compared to other series. Series III was favored by type fre-
quency alone, and accordingly it began to break down both earlier and
more thoroughly than the rst two series, leaving Modern English with a
still lower percentage of surviving strong verbs.
In Series IV and IX, the importance of the function of ablaut over type
frequency also appears clearly. Here the two series, with identical vocalism
in the rst three principal parts, merged their past participles in favor of
the vowel /o/ from Series IX. This process began in Old English (Krygier
1994: 54), and I therefore categorize them into a single series by the time
of the great shift to weak verbs in early Middle English. The [o] participles
in Series IX had a lower type frequency, but [o] is more distinct from [e]
and [] than is [e], and the more distinctive participle was extended, not
the more frequent one. Furthermore, all verbs from these series that
remain strong to the present day now have preterites in [o] taken from
the past participle. This pattern reinforces the conclusion that distinctness
of vowel quality heavily favors survival. Due to the scarcity of surviving
weak verbs from this class, it is dicult to analyze the eects of token fre-
quency, but wreak looks oddly frequent for a weak verb. It may have been
Table 4. Factors Aecting Series I-III
Type Frequency Consistent Root Shape Vowel distinctness
Series I
Series II
Series III
92 Sherrylyn Branchaw
due to analogy with work if metathesis is applied often enough to the
[wr] cluster
2
.
Back-up support for the survival of strong verbs in IV and IX is found
in the root structure. Krygier nds a 90% correlation between preservation
of strong verbs in the 12th century and the presence of a single root-nal
sonorant (1994: 248249). The transfer of wear from the weak system to
the strong on the analogy of bear and tear (OED) is also evidence for the
eects of root structure here. Also transferred to this series was wake from
Series VI based on the analogy of break and speak (OED), all of which
sounded a great deal more alike in the sixteenth century than they do
now. In Table 7, I use Leiths table showing the sociolinguistic distribution
of vowels for mate, meat, and meet in 1600 to show what the possibilities
for our verbs are. The reader is advised to keep in mind that as their spell-
Table 5. Strong Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
speak sprecan 276 sprc spr con 310 sprecen 53
tread tredan 19 trd 28 tr don 14 treden 21
weave wefan 10 wf 1 w fon 1 wefen 26
bear beran 333 br 336 b ron 127 boren 532
break brecan 142 brc 221 br con 96 brocen
steal stelan 43 stl 47 st lon 17 stolen 48
tear teran 6 tr 17 t ron 17 toren 15
Table 6. Weak Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
mete
2
metan mt m ton meten
wreak wrecan 112 wrc 80 wr con 7 wrecen 68
quell cwelan 5 cwl 1 cw lon 4 cwelen 1
2
No gures were obtainable for mete due to excessive homophony.
2. Suggested to me by Donka Minkova.
Survival of the Strongest 93
ings suggest, break and speak were once pronounced identically, and their
modern pronunciation reects the selection of an unshifted break from a
dialect that did not undergo the stage of the Great Vowel Shift that raised
the vowel of speak (Lass 1999: 9698).
The same product-oriented schema that allows us to expect dug, struck,
and even snuck to match swung and stung allows woke to match broke
despite dierences in the innitive. Wake, much like shit, had only two
principal parts attested in Old English and now has a preterite from
another series and an unexpected innitive (OED). In the case of wake,
the innitive comes from the weak verb. Shit we will return to later.
In Series IV, like VI and IX, the survival of verbs as strong or weak
correlates reasonably well with their token frequency. These three series
have in common relatively high type frequency and good vowel distribu-
tion. For the gures of Series VI, see Tables 8 through 10. The outstand-
ing exceptions to survival based on token frequency are wreak and fare.
The OED attributes the weakening of fare to confusion with its weak
counterpart, and the weakening of wreak, as mentioned above, may have
been due to confusion with work. It still remains to be asked, of course,
why these particular verbs were more susceptible to confusion with their
weak counterparts than other similar verbs such as steal, and that will
require further investigation.
Few verbs survive from Series VII. None retains the original strong
inection; three are unequivocally weak, and one, namely dive, hesitates
between strong and weak, but the strong inection is that of another
series. The gures appear in Tables 11 and 12, and individual verbs are
discussed following the tables. Bow, according to the OED, began to
absorb the meanings of its weak causative bey in the 13th and 14th cen-
turies, and simultaneously it became weak. Its weak outcome is therefore
like fare and possibly wreak, which as seen above also became confused
with weak counterparts. Brook has no attested strong forms in Middle
English (Krygier 1994: 257), so we can conclude that it was not robustly
strong even in Old English. Dive, the one verb from this series with strong
Table 7. Wake, break, speak c. 1600. (Leith 1983: 1489)
Aristocracy Bourgeoisie Lower Class
meet [i:] meet [i:] meet [i:]
break/speak meat [:]/[e:] meat [e:] meat [i:]
wake mate [:]/[:] mate [e:] mate [e:]
94 Sherrylyn Branchaw
forms, takes its innitive from the weak system and its strong preterite and
participle from Series VII to create a paradigm that ts nicely into Series
II (OED).
The fact that so few verbs from this series survive into Modern English
should not, of course, be taken to say anything about the type frequency
of the series in Middle English. The Middle English type frequency num-
bers will need to be computed separately, relative to those of all the other
series. I point this out because of the disparity between the similar Old
English type frequencies of Series VI and VII and the number of modern
survivals. The disparities are presented in Table 13.
There were two other series, V and VIII, that merged the last principal
part that kept them separate, this time for a phonological reason. In the
early part of the Middle Ages, [a:w] and [o:w] regularly became [ou]. I
Table 8. Strong Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
(for)sake sacan 130 so#c 139 so#con 29 sacen 22
shake sceacan 21 sceo#c 80 sceo#con 3 sceacen 25
stand standan 473 sto#d 766 sto#don 296 standen 80
draw dragan 7 dro#h 2 dro#gon 11 dragen 21
wake wo#c 41 wo#con 14
Table 9. Weak Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
fare faran 573 fo#r fo#ron 291 faren 291 [sic]
wade wadan 13 wo#d wo#don 2 waden 4
wash wascan 6 wo#x 2 wo#xon 1 waxen 2
Table 10. Uncertain Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
grave grafan 8 gro#f 9 gro#fon 2 grafen 28
lade hladan 12 hlo#d 9 hlo#don 8 hladen 27
shave scafan 3 sco#f sco#fon 0 scafen 4
Survival of the Strongest 95
therefore think it fair to consider these as one class with high type fre-
quency by the time of the breakdown of the strong verb system. However,
unlike in most series, including the otherwise similar IV/IX, the survival
of strong versus weak verbs in V/VIII does not evidently follow token
frequency lines. Figures are presented in Tables 14, 15, and 16. Grow
and throw have inexplicably low token frequencies to survive as strong
although with the proviso that homophony prevented counts of the pre-
terite of throw. If these two survive as strong, one would expect ow to
do so as well with the same root shape, ablaut, and type frequency, and
signicantly higher token frequency, which is not the case. The verbs of
this series remain a mystery to me.
All verbs in Series X and above have low type frequencies, and several
have frequencies as low as 1, meaning they are unique patterns. Accord-
ingly, they have a low survival rate of strong verbs, and generally only
verbs with very high token frequencies survive. Verbs belonging to a series
higher than X have type frequencies of no more than 7, and it is at this
point that I have grouped all the remaining verbs together rather than
giving separate tables for each. Because of the high numbers of verbs sur-
viving as weak, I give only a selection of those in Table 23.
Table 11. Weak Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
brook bru#can 189 bre# ac 50 brucon 13 brocen
bow bu#gan 271 be# ah 138 bugon 111 bogen 43
shove scu#fan 30 sce# af scufon 14 scofen 40
Table 12. Uncertain Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
dive du#fan 12 de#af dufon 1 dofen 3
Table 13
Old English type frequency # of Modern English survivals
Series VI 11 11
Series VII 10 4
96 Sherrylyn Branchaw
Table 14. Strong Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
grow gro#wan 15 gre# ow 10 gre# owon 3 gro#wen 3
blow bla#wan 16 ble# ow 57 ble# owon 2 bla#wen 40
know cna#wan 242 cne# ow 341 cne# owon 96 cna#wen 82
throw ra#wan 2 re# ow re# owon ra#wen 15
Table 15. Weak Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
ow o#wan 24 e# ow 51 e# owon 24 o#wen 22
row ro#wan 9 re# ow 8 re# owon 3 ro#wen 3
mow ma#wan 2 me# ow me# owon 2 ma#wen 2
Table 16. Uncertain Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
sow sa#wan se# ow 26 se# owon 9 sa#wen 6
Table 17. Strong Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
fall feallan 91 fe# oll 209 fe# ollon 184 feallen 86
hold healdan 828 he# old 1047 he# oldon 256 healden 473
Table 18. Weak Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
fold fealdan 3 fe# old 19 fe# oldon 2 fealden 21
wield
3
wealdan we# old 67 we# oldon 8 wealden 25
wax weaxan 62 we# ox 126 we# oxon 25 weaxen 53
3
Wield is a result of the merger of strong wealdan and weak wieldan according to
the OED.
Survival of the Strongest 97
Series XI and greater
Sorting out the relative impacts of root shape, token frequency, and
vowel distinctness is interesting. In general, verbs with high token fre-
quency, in particular of the preterite singular, survive as strong. As we
expect, the lower the type frequency, the higher the token frequency needs
to be for a verb to come out as strong. Consider for example step as com-
pared to weave in Series IV above. There are no root shape eects, nearly
similar ablaut pattern once the participial [o] of weave was transferred to
the preterite in the fourteenth and fteenth centuries, and a much more
frequent preterite for step, yet the preterite of step has been stepped since
the Middle Ages (OED; Krygier 1994). The lower type frequency of step
was obviously what disfavored it for survival. In many cases, however,
a type frequency of less than 10 overlaps with the presence of a liquid-
consonant cluster, which Krygier nds a signicant factor in the weaken-
ing process during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (1994: 248).
Table 19. Strong Outcome
Modern
English
Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
slay sle# an 281 slo#h >365 slo#gon 325 slagen 355
lie licgan 76 lg 440 l gon 11 legen
sit sittan 164 st 663 s ton 309 seten
give
4
giefan 16 geaf 785 ge# afon 50 giefen 20
get
4
gietan 75 geat >345 ge# aton 170 gieten 65
eat etan 206 t ton 146 eten 9
swear swerian 40 swo#r 174 swo#ron 30 sworen 28
come cuman 826 co#m 6050
cwo#m 425
co#mon 1023
cwo#mon 65
cumen 580
ght feohtan 89 feaht 269 fuhton 230 fohten 19
see se# on 803 seah 1691 sa#won 728 sewen 613
4
The Old Norse borrowings account for the initial [g] in Modern English, which
would have been [ j] if from Old English.
98 Sherrylyn Branchaw
Two cases where verbs with high token frequency failed to remain
strong are outstanding: let and read. Both have low type frequency, high
token frequency unfortunately due to homophony I was unable to
obtain gures for the preterite singular of either limited vowel distinct-
ness, especially after [:] became [:], and both end in dentals.
Table 20. Weak Outcome
A selection of carve, starve, warp, help, melt, swallow, leap, ay, sleep, read,
let, burst, braid, ban, span, step, yield, yelp, weep, shed, shape, delve, spurn,
thresh/thrash
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
carve ceorfan 59 cearf 47 curfon 19 corfen 69
help helpan 106 healp 9 hulpon 2 holpen 36
melt meltan 13 mealt 6 multon 5 molten 13
swallow swelgan 33 swealh 45 swulgon 15 swolgen 10
leap hle# apan 6 hle# op 17 hle# opon 3 hle# apen 1
sleep sl pan 2 sle# p 56 sle# pon 31 sl pen 1
read r dan 159 re# d re# don 2 r den
let l tan 512 le# t le# ton l ten 360
burst berstan 25 brst 79 burston 36 borsten 16
Table 21. Uncertain Outcome
Modern English Innitive Pret. sg. Pret. pl. Past participle
shear scieran 1 scear scearon scoren 31
heave hebban 104 ho#f ho#fon 14 hafen 7
hang ho#n he# ng 3 he# ngon 11 hangen 1
swell swellan 2 swealh 43 swullon swollen 38
beat be# atan 18 be# ot be# oton 22 be# aten 31
hew he# awan 19 he# ow he# owon 11 he# awen 29
bid biddan 579 bd 1068 b don 330 beden 105
Survival of the Strongest 99
Now, Krygier nds a strong enough correlation between dental-nal
verbs and the shift to weak in the twelfth century for him to conclude
that root-nal dentals triggered the disintegration. His explanation for
the phenomenon is that the Norman French speakers, using English as a
second language, reinterpreted the root-nal dental as the dental preterite.
Anglo-Saxons, with native-speaker intuitions about which verbs were
weak and which were strong, interpreted that as the speakers of the pres-
tige dialect inecting strong verbs as weak, and they generalized it to the
weakening but the most salient strong verbs (1994: 148).
Although relatively little eect by the Normans on the English gram-
mar has been demonstrated
3
, weakening of strong verbs is a move in the
direction of simplifying the grammar, and therefore I consider it at least
possible that once the Normans triggered the change, the Anglo-Saxons
might have continued to carry it out. I am not committed to his explana-
tion, but I would like to point out that no matter who or what triggered
the change, if the shift from strong to weak indeed began among dental-
nal verbs, several of these verbs ablauted with vowels of a low degree of
perceptual distinctness. Examples include let, read, shed, and beat. In each
case, the vowel of the preterite was a front mid vowel or diphthong that
became a front mid vowel in Early Middle English, and in each case the
vowel of the present tense was a front mid vowel or diphthong that
became a front mid vowel. If Norman speakers, or even native speakers,
could hardly hear the dierence between the root of the strong past and
of the present, and if the preterite already had a dental at the end, they
might all the more easily have been reinterpreted as weak.
In contrast, verbs ending in dentals with distinctive vowels in the pre-
sent and preterite or participle, such as writePwrotePwritten and sitPsat
survive as strong. Their survival indicates that the dental alone did not
fate a verb to become weak and that additional explanation, such as vowel
distinctness, is called for.
Sit is perhaps the strongest of the strong verbs. Despite its dental and
low type frequency, sit had a high enough token frequency to continue to
3. There is more evidence for Norse inuence on the grammar of English, but
in most cases where the OE verb is strong, the Norse cognate is also strong.
In fact, in some cases where the Norse verb is weak, e.g., ing, the OE verb
is strong and remains so. Whether the interaction between two languages
with robust strong verb systems but with diering vowel qualities in many
preterites e.g., OE br and ON bar would be enough to trigger a general
shift toward weakening verbs, I cannot answer denitively, but I doubt it.
100 Sherrylyn Branchaw
be inected as strong, which itself is not surprising. What may come as a
surprise, depending on the framework in which one operates, is that sit
must have been largely responsible for the preterite shat of shit and prob-
ably the preterite spat of spit. Shit should conjugate shitePshote, and spit
was originally weak (OED). The problem is that the process of analogy is
not well understood by linguists. In a nearest neighbor model, the most
similar form already present in the lexicon, in this case sat, provides the
template for the new form being produced, in this case the preterites of
shit and spit.
Other ndings, though, including those of Bybee (2001: 124), suggest
that a type frequency of more than three verbs should be necessary for
productivity. Furthermore, even if one counters that other verbs, such as
bidPbad, display the same pattern, Moder (1992) nds that as high
token frequency leads to greater autonomy, items with high token fre-
quency have weaker connections to related forms and thus are more likely
to become independent and less likely to contribute to the formation of
productive classes (Bybee 2001: 136). According to this principle, a type
including sitPsat and bidPbad, for example, should not take in new
members like spit and shit because sitPsat should be treated as an isolate.
A resolution may lie in the use of a framework that allows for analogies
to multiple neighbors. If in the sixteenth century, spit was perceived as
closely resembling both sit and spin in dierent respects, then the preterites
sat and span might both have contributed to the formation of the preterite
spat. Then, by the nineteenth century, speakers of the language have sitP
sat, spitPspat, and spinPspan, which would all tend to contribute toward
shat as one of the options for the preterite of shit. However, the jury is still
out on whether this sort of multiple analogy eect is possible in grammars:
Albright and Hayes (2003: 152) are rather emphatic that it is not.
From the results obtained in this paper, I conclude that the single most
important factor in preserving the strong inection of a verb was the per-
ceptual ease of distinguishing the vowels of the principal parts. Token
frequency and root shape are hard to rank with respect to one another.
Within series of all type frequencies, with isolated exceptions, token fre-
quency was responsible for selecting which survived as weak and which
as strong. Root shape was denitely responsible for the transfer of a verb
from one series to another or from outside the strong verb system into it.
Root shape played a signicant role in holding existing strong verbs in the
system, which is especially visible when the verb was poorly attested in
Old English. Type frequency seems less important than the other factors
as type of high frequencies might have low survival rates, and isolated
Survival of the Strongest 101
type frequencies might have robust strong inection, depending on the
other factors. It is certainly not unimportant, however, as reected in the
organization of this paper. The lower the type frequency, the greater the
other factors, especially token frequency, must be in order to keep a verb
strong.
Regarding the more general theoretical implications, the strong verbs
support a product-oriented schema in which a preterite of a desired shape,
such as struck and dug is derived from inputs of dierent shapes strike
and dig. There is also some evidence for multiple analogies in which one
new form may be produced by analogy with multiple existing forms.
Much work, however, remains to be done on the development of the
strong verbs. I intend to do a more accurate and precise token frequency
count of forms in Old English using the searchable corpus and to ob-
tain frequency counts from Middle English and perhaps Early Modern
English. Toward that end, there exist searchable parsed corpora from
those periods from the Penn Helsinki project, as well as other resources,
such as Longs dissertation The English Strong Verb: From Chaucer to
Caxton. Once the numbers are more reliable, statistical analyses can be
carried out to nd the answer to the question How frequent is frequent
enough?
The verbs that are historically weak but synchronically strong, verbs of
the leadPled type, and historically weak but synchronically partially
strong verbs of the keepPkept type, must be included in the study. Such
verbs both provide further examples in the language of indicating gram-
matical change through a change in the vowel, which must have been
important in the preservation of the historically strong verbs, and they
provide analogies for specic strong verbs, such as readPread.
Dierent models of analogy will be tested to see how well they predict
the outcomes of these data. Hayes and Albright (2003), among others,
have done a study with modern native speakers to see how they handle
nonce verbs and have produced a model based on their study, but to my
knowledge, no one has investigated the success of dierent analogical
models in explaining the data of Middle English.
I intend to quantify statements about vowel distribution with as much
precision as possible. Flemmings dissertation Auditory Representations in
Phonology explores the spread of vowels within the space of the mouth
and the number of distinctions that can be made and perceived. I will see
how his model applies to the data of verbs losing ablaut because their
vowels were too close together. I also intend to quantify the critical
102 Sherrylyn Branchaw
mass reached in Middle English when Series I verbs no longer required a
nasal, allowing the past tense of strike to be struck.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to my advisor, Donka Minkova, for guidance in writing
this paper and to the students and professors in the Program in Indo-
European Studies at UCLA for feedback on drafts.
References
Albright, Adam and Bruce Hayes
2003 Rules vs. Analogy in English Past Tenses: A Computational/
Experimental Study. Cognition 90: 119161.
Bybee, Joan
2001 Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic
Form. February 11, 2005. Antonette di Paolo Healy Centre
for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. <ets.umdl.umich.
edu/o/oec/>
Flemming, Edward S.
2002 Auditory Representations in Phonology. New York: Routledge.
Krygier, Marcin
1994 The Disintegration of the English Strong Verb System. University
of Bamberg Studies in English Linguistics, vol. 34. Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang GmbH.
Lass, Roger
1994 Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion. Cambridge
University Press.
Lass, Roger
1992 Phonology and Morphology. In The Cambridge History of the
English Language, Volume II: 10661476, edited by Norman
Blake, 23155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lass, Roger
1999 Phonology and Morphology. In The Cambridge History of the
English Language, Volume III, 14761776, edited by Roger Lass,
56186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leith, Dick
1983 A Social History of English. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Survival of the Strongest 103
Long, Mary McDonald
1994 The English Strong Verb from Chaucer to Caxton. Menasha,
Wisc.: Banta.
Moder, Carol Lynn
1992 Productivity and Categorization in Morphological Classes. Bualo,
NY: SUNY dissertation.
Oxford English Dictionary
September
2007
John Simpson. Oxford University Press. <www.oed.com>
Quirk, Randolph et al.
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London,
New York: Longman.
Welna, Jerzy
1996 English Historical Morphology. Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu
Warsawskiego.
104 Sherrylyn Branchaw
Commentary on Branchaw, Survival of the Strongest:
Strong Verb Inection from Old to Modern English
Markku Filppula and Juhani Klemola
Sherrylyn Branchaws article focuses on the diachronic development of
strong verb inection from Old English to Modern English and, spe-
cically, on the question of why some verbs have remained strong to the
present day while others have become weak.
The method Branchaw has chosen for her study is sound: she uses the
OE verb system as her starting point and sets out to nd what kind of
factors could explain survival of certain kinds of strong verbs into the
ME period and beyond. The factors examined include type frequency
(the number of verbs with the same Ablaut pattern), token frequency (the
number of occurrences of a specic verb in the Dictionary of Old English
Corpus), shape of the root of the verb, and eciency of the Ablaut pattern
in making the distinctions. All these are relevant and yield interesting re-
sults despite the fact that the statistics are not yet completely accurate as
the author herself points out. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind
that the nature of the surviving OE textual evidence is such that any quan-
titative generalizations based on the corpus must be treated with caution.
The method used in the study has another potentially major limitation:
Branchaw compares her OE data only with standard present-day English
and totally disregards the evidence oered by non-standard dialects. The
English Dialect Dictionary (EDD), for example, provides ample evidence
of extensive variation in the past and past participle forms in most if not
all of the series of strong verbs discussed by Branchaw. To give but some
examples, the following verbs from Branchaws Series I, which she con-
siders to survive as strong only, are attested in nineteenth-century dialects
with weak outcomes: bind, drink, run, spring, swim, swing, wind, slink. The
preterite and past participle forms for drink serve as an illustration of the
considerable range of variability in the dialect data:
pret. drak, drenk, drenked, drinked, dronk, druck, drunk
pp. dhrunken, drank, drinked, dronken, drucken, druckin, druken,
drukken, drunk, drunken
In Branchaws Series III, in turn, all of the four verbs with strong out-
comes ( y, choose, freeze, shoot) are also found with weak outcomes in
the EDD. To give an idea of the broad range of variability found in the
dialectal data, we list in the following the dierent preterite and past par-
ticiple forms recorded for the verb freeze in the EDD:
pret. fraaz, fraaze, fraze, frez, friz, frore, fruize, fruz, vreezed, vriz, vrore
pp. frawn, freezen, frez, friz, frizzent, froan, froar, froaz, froozed, fror,
frore, froren, frorn, frown, froze, frozed, frozzan, frozzen, fruozen,
fruz, fruzzen, vraur, vreezed, vriz, vroar, vror, vrore
Taking these dialectal data into consideration would not necessarily have
aected the overall conclusions reached by Branchaw, but it would have
brought to light some of the complexities involved in assessing the relative
weight of each of the factors examined here.
The otherwise clear exposition of the data and the argumentation suf-
fers somewhat from the abrupt transition from Series I to III to IV and IX
in the description of the types of strong verbs. This is aggravated by the
lack of explanation in the previous text about the number of the series
as Branchaw calls them and their distinguishing features. The reader
would also have beneted from some kind of an introduction to Tables 5
and 6. Other shortcomings include a rather heavy reliance on work by
others (especially Krygier 1994 and Bybee 2001) in matters relating to fac-
tors inuencing survival of (types of ) strong verbs. Multiple analogy is
suggested as an explanation for some individual verbs (shit, spit), but the
mentioned counterarguments to multiple analogies by Albright and Hayes
(2003) remain unexplained.
Despite the mentioned shortcomings, Branchaw has made an im-
portant contribution to the eld by showing, rst, that a multiplicity of
factors need to be considered in trying to explain why some strong verb
forms have survived up to the present day, and, second, that some of these
factors have been more inuential than others. According to her results,
the perceptual ease of distinguishing the vowels of the principal parts
turned out to be the most important factor in preserving the strong inec-
tion of a verb. Token frequency and shape of the root were next in the
hierarchy whereas type frequency had less of an eect on the survival rates
than the others. Branchaws results are persuasive, notwithstanding the
aforementioned limitation concerning the evidence from dialectal forms
of English.
106 Markku Filppula and Juhani Klemola
Response to Filppula and Klemola
Sherrylyn Branchaw
I would like to thank the reviewer of my paper for the helpful comments
provided, and here I will respond to points made about dialect forms and
about multiple analogy.
Data forms from dialects other than what is now the American stan-
dard are of course invaluable. Their importance is hinted at in my paper
in this volume in the use of the forms drug and snuck, and they are used
more crucially in my talk at ICEHL 15 (Munich, August 2008). It is not
my goal to explain all forms in any dialect of the English language,
though that is a valuable endeavor, for that would make the task of this
particular project too large, but to use them both to explain the origin of
standard forms and as evidence for linguistic phenomena.
As an example of the former, the OED explains the preterite drew for
draw as a form that arose in the Middle English dialect of the north of
England where a phonological change that occurred in the south did not
take place, and therefore in the north draw and blow continued to resem-
ble each other closely. The analogy blow : blew :: draw : X, where X is
drew, was therefore more apt in the north than in the south, and the form
drew spread until it entered what would become the standard dialect. The
north, therefore, is indirectly responsible for other preterites such as slew
and ew. Those forms probably arose when the past tense morpheme
<ew> became associated with present tenses in both <aw> and <ow>
thus making it a product-oriented schema. Because <ew> tense form no
longer occurred only with present tenses of a single form, it was free to
become more productive and expand to verbs of still other vowels such
as slay and y. Nonstandard forms in modern American English such as
drug and snuck provide still more evidence for product-oriented schemas
since drag and sneak do not share the vowel of sting and the other mem-
bers of its class. Examples such as these abound.
Furthermore, as my reviewers point out, one can imagine that Old
English might predict the outcomes of some dialects better than it does
standard American English, or, for that matter, standard British English.
In that case, the dialects will form a backdrop against which to evaluate
other factors that have been at work in the standard language, one of
which might be the inuence of grammarians.
As for multiple analogy, the debate is still open, and further research
will be required before I can assert a belief in its existence or non-
existence. Hayes and Albright test their learner models against predictions
that would be made if multiple analogy, which they call variegated anal-
ogy, held true. They identify the kinds of patterns in English that their
model, programmed not to use variegated analogy, would fail to identify,
but they do not nd their model failing to identify these patterns. They
conclude that variegated analogy adds nothing to their model and there-
fore that it is not at work in the grammar of speakers.
Still other scholars, such as Bybee and Hay, have models where each
word has phonological, morphological, and semantic connections of vary-
ing strengths with other words. Such models would allow spit to have pho-
nological connections with the -it of sit and with the spi- of spin. Because
the ablaut of sat and span is a morphological connection between them,
the morphological pattern could be extended analogically to create spat.
I am interested in evaluating this possibility because the rest of the
verbs
4
that form their past tense with // end in nasals, velars, or nasal
velars. Much work has been devoted to characterizing this class, to which
swimPswam and singPsang belong.
It is hard for me to see how spit could have been generated without the
existence of sat since spit does not end in a nasal or velar, and the gram-
mar of modern English by Quirk et al. (1985) places sit and spit into a sub-
category to which no other verbs belong. Yet a popular claim asserts that
high frequency words with unique morphology remain idiosyncratic and
do not form the basis for analogy. If this assertion is true, sit alone makes
a poor model for spit. This claim itself, however, has also been called into
question. Hare and Elman (1995) report an experiment in which speakers
pronounced the nonce-word vone to rhyme with the idiosyncratic gone
rather than bone. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if indubitable exam-
ples in natural language can be found.
The case of spat, then, will make an interesting test case for the claims
about the existence of multiple analogy and about the existence of analo-
gizing based on a single, high-frequency item. If neither of those phenom-
ena exists, then it is necessary to re-evaluate the criteria of the class of sing
4. With the exception of (for)bidP(for)bad(e), for speakers who have //
rather than /ei/.
108 Sherrylyn Branchaw
and swim to admit a verb ending in a dental stop. In any case, the English
strong verb preterites, both of the standard American English and of other
dialects, form a fertile testing ground for morphological theory.
References
Hare, M. & J.L. Elman
1995 Learning and Morphological Change. Cognition 56.1: 6198.
Quirk, Randolph et al.
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London,
New York: Longman.
Response to Filppula and Klemola 109
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change of the
Derivational Sux -ing in the History of English
*
Akiko Nagano
1. Introduction
In the literature on Present-day English (PE) word formation, compound
nouns of the form [Noun Verb-ing] (e.g., city planning, housekeeping,
letter writing) and compound nouns of the form [ Noun Verb-er] (e.g.,
dish washer, taxi driver, watchmaker) are often called synthetic com-
pound nouns. The possible grammatical relation between the rst Noun
and the second Verb in these constructions has constituted an important
topic of discussion. For example, Bloomeld (1933: 231232) claims that
synthetic compounds embody the verb-object relationship, and Marchand
(1969: 1519) also denes synthetic compounds in terms of the verb-object
relationship. To state simply the most generally held view, PE synthetic
compounds are based on the verb-object relationship and exclude the
subject-verb relationship (Adams 2001: 7879, Lieber 2005: 381).
Against this background, this paper will examine -ing compound nouns
diachronically and will argue that -ing compound nouns in Old English
(OE) and Middle English (ME) allowed the subject-verb relationship and
that certain types of PE -ing compound nouns do as well. The aim of this
paper lies in elucidating the relationship between the possibility of subject
compounding (SC hereafter) and a functional change of the derivational
sux -ing. In short, I will argue that the possibility of SC in -ing changes
throughout the history of English and that this change can be accounted
for in terms of a functional change of the derivational sux -ing.
* I would like to thank the audience at the 5th meeting of the Studies of the His-
tory of English Language (SHEL) for their helpful comments. I am also
indebted to Elizabeth Traugott and two anonymous reviewers for their valu-
able comments and suggestions. Thanks also go to Molly Bassett and Kurt
Spurlock for stylish improvements. Needless to say, responsibility for any
errors is my own. This work is nancially supported by Grant-in-Aid for
Young Scientists (B), No. 19720115, from the Ministry of Education, Culture,
Sports, Science and Technology in Japan.
2. Subject Compounding in PE
Consider the representative examples of PE -ing compound nouns cited in
(1). The derivational sux -ing forms a deverbal compound noun. The
acceptability dierence between (1a) and (1b) indicates that, unlike an
object, the subject of a head verb cannot be compounded as the non-head
of an -ing deverbal compound. For instance, the non-head noun of the
acceptable compound noun car-driving is interpreted as an object of the
head verb, while the compound noun *girl-swimming is unacceptable if
the non-head is interpreted as a subject of the head verb.
(1) a. car-driving, carol-singing, fruit-devouring, pasta-eating
e.g., Bicycle-repairing went on in the back room.
(Adams 2001: 78)
Taxi-driving by John can be dangerous.
(Di Sciullo 1992: 65)
Flower-arranging by experts is preferable to do-it-yourself.
(ibid.)
b. *child-devouring (of fruit) a child devours fruit, *dog-running,
*girl-swimming, *rain-falling, *sunrising, *weather changing
e.g., *Unexpected guest-arriving is a nuisance. (Adams 2001: 78)
*Man-sleeping is sometimes noisy. (Di Sciullo 1992: 65)
*Sun-rising is nice to watch. (ibid.)
This fact is considered to be a general property of PE -ing compound
nouns, as Adams (2001: 7879) shows:
Compounded process nominalizations cannot easily exhibit relationships
other than that of verb-object: compare the subject-verb expressions in
*unexpected guest-arriving is a nuisance, *frequent dog-barking disturbs
the neighbors, *mechanic-repairing of bicycles, *tycoon-evasion of taxes.
Adjuncts and complements of the verb other than direct objects also appear
strange when compounded with process nominalizations: *guest-cooking of
meals, *council-sending of letters.
Unacceptable -ing compound nouns such as (1b) and those found in the
above citation led some researchers to propose general principles to
exclude SC in -ing. Roeper and Siegels (1978) First Sister Principle and
112 Akiko Nagano
Selkirks (1982) First Projection Principle are probably the most famous
examples of such general principles on compounding.
1
Interestingly, PE allows SC when the head verb is nominalized by a suf-
x other than -ing. For example, the non-heads of the deverbal compound
nouns in (2a) and (2b) below can be interpreted as subjects of the head
verbs. In these cases, the head verbs are nominalized not by the sux
-ing but by conversion or by nominalization suxes of lesser productivity
like -al.
(2) a. baby-step, bee sting, earthquake, heart-ache, lion attack, the
Mitterrand visit, mouse-squeak, rainfall, sunset, weather change
e.g., One of the best-known episodes of repeated lion attack
occurred in Kenya in 1898. Rail construction was going
on about 40 miles north of Tsavo National Park when two
lions began killing the workers. Twenty-six Indians and a
similar number of Africans lost their lives before the lions
were shot. (www.webcorp.org.uk)
There is concern that a weather change in South Australia
may do little to help the ght against big bushres on
Kangaroo Island. (www.webcorp.org.uk)
b. consumer choice,
2
dust accumulation, population growth,
train-arrival
e.g., Consumers choose products based on various tangible and
intangible attributes. Previous research has shown that there
is a dierence between appearance-based and word-based
evaluations of wood species. However, little research has
been done on how this dierence aects consumer choice.
(www.webcorp.org.uk)
As Bauer and Renouf (2001: 117120) claim, conversion gives rise to
numerous examples of SC. Along with instances of object compounding
(e.g., handshake, pay raise, tax cut), there are many instances, such as
bee sting and weather change, where the subject of an intransitive verb
is compounded. Additionally, there are some instances, such as lion
1. See Lieber (2005: 380383) for an up-to-date survey of the development of
this discussion in generative-linguistic word-formation theories.
2. Strictly speaking, the head noun of this deverbal compound is nominalized
not by suxation but by vowel alternation (choosePchoice).
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change 113
attack, where the subject rather than the object of a transitive verb is
compounded.
In the literature, the acceptability dierence between (1a) and (1b)
seems to be taken as a universal fact about -ing deverbal compounds in
PE; however, my corpus-based research (Nagano 2007) has found that
PE does allow SC in -ing to a limited extent, as the -ing compound nouns
in (3) below show. For example, the compound noun fruit-ripening in the
sample sentence in (3a) has the subject-verb interpretation fruit ripens.
One might argue that the compounds in (3a, b) are object compounds
and their category is adjective. Of course, as PE -ing compounds, they
might be used as object-incorporating compound adjectives (e.g., a fruit-
ripening factor, milk-souring bacteria), but the sample sentences cited in
(3a, b) clearly show that they can also be used as subject-incorporating
compound nouns. In fact, since these -ing compounds all describe a
natural phenomenon that is not caused volitionally by an external agent,
the subject-verb reading is much more frequent and easier to induce than
the verb-object reading.
(3) a. artery-hardening, fruit-ripening, gap-widening, muscle softening,
poverty deepening, skin-darkening, world-attening
e.g., Lower blood sugar (by natural means or with insulin if
necessary) according to the condition. This will decrease the
blood sugar in the body eectively, control the diabetes and
thus prevent or postpone the occurrence of artery hardening
indirectly. (www.webcorp.org.uk)
Because ethylene is the main trigger for fruit ripening,
several genetic engineering strategies involve the reduction
or prevention of ethylene production. Tomato fruits that do
not produce ethylene develop fully on the plant and then
stop before ripening and turning red. (www.webcorp.org.uk)
b. airway-narrowing, hair-thinning, milk-souring, muscle thinning
e.g., In exercise-induced asthma, the airway narrowing begins
within 5 to 15 minutes after initiating physical exercise.
(www.webcorp.org.uk)
Unfortunately there is no one simple explanation as to
why hair thinning occurs as it may be down to a medical
condition or it may be the type of lifestyle a person is
leading. In fact the only real way of determining the cause
of hair thinning is for a person to visit their doctor.
(www.webcorp.org.uk)
114 Akiko Nagano
The absence of these female hormones after menopause may
lead to . . . hair loss, skin coarsening, decrease in breast size
and support, and bone thinning. (www.webcorp.org.uk)
Notice that the head verbs of the -ing compounds in (3a, b) cannot
be nominalized by conversion. As Marchand (1969: 276277) observes, a
derived verb, whether a suxed one (e.g., to widen) or a converted one
(e.g., to thin), cannot be converted into a noun (e.g., *[widen]
N
, *[thin]
N
).
3
Due to this morphological restriction, the converted versions of the SC
compounds in (3a, b) (e.g., *[ gap-widen]
N
, *[hair-thin]
N
) are systematically
impossible. This is why -ing SC in PE is exceptionally allowed in (3); in
PE, SC is realized by conversion or by non-productive axes as discussed
above, but the unavailability of these options forces the exceptional use
of -ing compounding. My observation that conversion and -ing forms
constitute an almost complementary distribution in SC, with conversion
forms being unmarked options, is conrmed by the contrast between the
unacceptable instances in (1b) and the acceptable instances in (2a). For
example, compare the unacceptable -ing form *rainfalling with the accept-
able conversion form rainfall and the unacceptable *weather-changing
with the acceptable weather change.
It should be noted that we do not see this distributional fact as conver-
sion forms blocking -ing forms in SC. Rather, we will claim in section 5
that -ing SC is very dicult in PE as a result of the recategorization
function of the sux -ing, while conversion allows SC because it does not
have that function. See section 5 for details.
In sum, PE uses conversion or less-productive suxes than -ing for
SC, and SC in -ing is exceptionally allowed when these options are
unavailable.
3. Subject Compounding in OE and ME
In OE and ME, SC in -ing occurred more frequently than in PE, and its
possibility was independent of the existence of conversion counterparts.
3. This restriction on the morphological property of a base word seems to apply
to conversion in general, independently of syntactic category. A derived noun
or adjective cannot be converted into a verb either (e.g., *to arrival, *to free-
dom, *to guidance, *to idleness, *to piggy, *to spoonful ) (Bauer 1983: 223227,
Marchand 1969: 372373).
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change 115
For instance, OE compound nouns in (4)
4
and ME compound nouns in
(5) given below are just a few of many instances of -ing SC. These in-
stances suggest that many of PE conversion instances of SC, such as (2a),
originally had an -ing form. For instance, the PE conversion compound
earthquake had the -ing form erthe-quakinge in ME.
(4) eorbeofung earthquake, feaxfallung shedding of hair,
s-ebbing ebbing of the sea (Kastovsky 1992: 367)
(5) dai-dauing day-dawning daybreak, drope-falling drop-fall,
erthe-moving earth movement, erthe-quakinge earthquake,
sun-rising sunrise (Kageyama 1985: 14)
cok crowynge cock-crow, day-springyng day spring, hart stangyng
heart sting, sonne rysyng/arising sunrise, son settyng/doun gang-
ing sunset (Tajima 1985: 125)
SC by conversion was also allowed in OE and ME, and, as in PE, it seems
to have been a rather productive process. ME produced instances like (6)
below.
(6) earthquake, earthquave, herte-bren heartburn, nosebleed, sunne
sine sunshine, sunrise, sunset, toth-ake tooth-ache
(Marchand 1969: 76)
In short, the -ing SC was rather freely allowed in OE and ME, but, in
PE, its productivity has dropped. Instead, the rival conversion form has
gained productivity.
4. Functional Change of the Derivational Sux -ing
Kastovsky (1985, 1986) claims that a derivational ax has two main func-
tions: recategorization and naming. Recategorization refers to the
fact that a derivational sux usually changes the syntactic category of a
word as required by its syntactic environment. Naming describes the pro-
cess through which derivation yields a new name or label for an extra-
linguistic entity. For instance, compare the meanings of curiousness and
4. The suxes -ung and -ing were the same sux in OE. Kastovsky (1985: 241)
treats -ung as an alternant of his -ing
1
and groups the following OE derivatives
into the same action noun category:
(i) binding binding, delng digging, brastlung rustling, huntung hunting
116 Akiko Nagano
curiosity and those of callousness and callosity. The -ness form is a pure
transposition from adjective to noun,
5
while the -ity form can refer to
an entity as a countable noun (e.g., They admired his dress, but only as a
curiosity/ Callosities can be so painful as to aect a persons gait). Thus, in
Kastovskys terms, -ness tends toward a recategorization sux, while -ity
tends toward a naming sux.
In the domain of nominalization, these two derivational functions cor-
respond to Grimshaws (1990) distinction between event nominals and
result nominals.
6
An event nominal is a nominalization that changes
only the category of a base verb and inherits its argument structure, as in
(7) below. A result nominal is a nominalization that refers to a concrete
entity and does not inherit the argument structure of a base verb, as in
(8) below. An event nominal has an Event argument (Ev) as its external
argument and suppresses the original external argument of a base verb (as
indicated by x 0), while a result nominal only has a non-thematic argu-
ment R, which binds a specic LCS-argument of a base verb (as indicated
by R y).
7
(7) assign
V
<x <y>> !assignment
N
<Ev <x 0 <y>>
e.g., (Johns) assignment of dicult problems always causes
problems.
The assignment of that problem too early in the course always
causes problems. (Grimshaw 1990: 54)
5. The sux -ness changes only the syntactic category of a base word, so, for
instance, the sentence in (i a) is synonymous with the sentences in (i b, c)
(Arono 1976: 38).
(i) a. His callousness surprised me.
b. The fact that he was callous surprised me.
c. The extent to which he was callous surprised me.
6. To avoid unnecessary complications, I ignore here Grimshaws distinction
between complex event nominals and simple event nominals. A complex event
nominal has an argument structure to be realized syntactically (e.g., The
examination of the patients took a long time), whereas a simple event nominal,
though it similarly expresses an event, does not (e.g., The examination took a
long time).
7. For a more detailed comparison of the lexical representations of event and
result nominals, see Grimshaw (1990: section 3.3). The suppression of the
original external argument in event nominalization is explicated and empiri-
cally conrmed in Grimshaw (1990: chapter 4).
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change 117
(8) assignment
N
(R y) such that x assigns y (Grimshaw 1990: 67)
e.g., The assignments were long.
They study the/an/one/that assignment.
*The assignments of the problems took a long time.
(Grimshaw 1990: 54)
Major distinctive properties of event nominals are listed in (9) below.
These properties function as criteria for distinguishing event nominals
from result nominals.
(9) a. An event nominal has to realize the argument structure inherited
from its base verb.
b. Occurrence with an adjective such as constant and frequent
forces an event-nominal reading.
c. An event nominal from a transitive verb cannot realize its
subject argument without realizing its object argument.
d. An event nominal cannot take a determiner other than the.
e. An event nominal cannot be plural.
f. An event nominal cannot occur in a predicative nominal
position.
First of all, these criteria clearly show that PE nominalizations by the
sux -ing are always event nominals (except lexicalized instances such as
buildings, happenings, paintings), while nominalizations by conversion are
almost always result nominals. Notice the examination of -ing nominals in
(10) and of conversion nominals in (11) below. The numbering in these ex-
amples corresponds to the numbering of the criteria in (9). For example,
we can see in (10d and e) that -ing nominals meet the criteria in (9d and
e). However, we can see in (11d and e) that conversion nominals do not.
(10) a. the felling *(of the trees), the destroying *(of the city)
b. Constant shooting *(of rabbits) should be prohibited.
c. The governments raising *(of taxes) will invite endless
criticism.
The raising *(of taxes) by the government will invite endless
criticism.
d. *A/one/that shooting of rabbits is illegal.
e. *The shootings of rabbits are illegal.
f. *That was the destroying of the city.
118 Akiko Nagano
(11) a. *Johns hit of Mary, *the drive of this car, *the break of
the vase
b. *Johns frequent hit of Mary,
*the constant break of the vase (is a nuisance)
c. Johns random hit, the kick by Bill
d. take a long walk, I enjoyed that walk along the shore.
e. Whos the TV comedian who does funny walks?
f. That was Johns great hit.
Notice that the most important and conspicuous dierence between -ing
nominalization and conversion nominalization in PE is that an -ing nomi-
nal always inherits the argument structure of a base verb, as in (10a), but
a conversion nominal does not, as in (11a).
8
In Kastovskys terms,
these observations mean that, in PE, -ing functions primarily as a recate-
gorization sux, while the chief function of the verb-to-noun conversion is
naming.
9
Interestingly, in the OE and (at least) early ME periods, the sux -ing
was used more as a naming sux than as a recategorization sux, and
-ing nominals of these periods were predominantly result nominals.
Koma (2000) examines -ing nominals in OE data (lfrics Catholic Homi-
lies and Orosius) on the basis of the list in (9) and concludes that OE -ing
nominals were result nominals. Although there is not enough space here to
review his results in detail, below is some of his clearest evidence for this
8. Citing the following instances, Borer (2003: 54) argues against this view:
(i) a. a good living, a strong craving, a strong beating, a reading
b. Women are reared not to feel competent or gratied by the questing,
the competing, the outbidding that collecting. . .
c. (this kind of) ghting, fraternizing, parenting, writing
(ii) a. My constant change of mentors from 19921997
b. The frequent release of the prisoners by the governor
c. The frequent use of sharp tools by underage children
However, these instances are in a small minority and should be considered
exceptional.
9. As discussed in Kastovsky (1986), the two functions of a derivational sux,
recategorization and naming, are not an either-or matter, but rather two
opposite ends of the same scale. Each sux nds itself somewhere between
those two ends. Even the sux -ing and the conversion (or the zero sux)
sometimes exhibit the combination of these two functions, as the data (i, ii)
in Note 8 suggest. However, their positions on the scale should be extremely
close to the two opposite ends.
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change 119
conclusion. Compare the following four pieces of data in (12ad) with the
criteria in (9a, c, e, f ) respectively:
(12) a. Pilatus he hfde on reatunge. . .
[reatunge < reatian to threaten]
He held Pilatus in threatening. . . (Orosius 136/1)
onne he mid genierunge fram geferrdene his gecorenra
hi totwm
[nierung < nierian to accuse, condemn]
when he, with condemnation, shall separate them from the
fellowship of his chosen (Homilies 1/412/1718)
b. An event -ing nominal from a transitive verb could realize its
subject and object arguments in one of the following three
patterns in OE, but no such instance can be found in the data.
i) *the enemys destruction the citys
[Genitive] [Genitive]
ii) *the citys destruction the enemys
[Genitive] [Genitive]
iii) *the citys destruction through the enemy
[Genitive] [Accusative]
*the citys destruction from the enemy
[Genitive] [Dative]
c. for hiora mgdena orunga
[orung < orian to oer]
on account of the oerings of their maidens (Orosius 2/910)
d. re lufe fandung is s weorces fremming.
[fremming < fremman to accomplish]
The proof of love is the performance of work.
(Homilies 2/314/2627)
In (12a), we have OE -ing nominals that are derived from transitive verbs
but that do not realize the object arguments of the verbs. Also, as stated in
(12b), no instance of an -ing nominal that realizes both subject and object
arguments was found. The -ing nominal in (12c) takes a plural form, while
that in (12d) occurs in a predicative position.
Parallel instances have been found for early ME -ing nominals. Below
are the most explicit pieces of evidence of their result nominal status: the
120 Akiko Nagano
occurrence with an indenite article [cf. (9d)] and the occurrence in a
plural form [cf. (9e)].
10
(13) a. And certes every man, mayden, or wyf
May understonde that Jhesus, hevene kyng,
Ne wolde nat chese a vicious lyvyng.
(The Canterbury Tales, WB 11801182)
And surely every man, maiden, or wife can understand that
Jesus, heavens king, would not choose sinful living.
b. And over alle the houses angles
Ys ful of rounynges and of jangles
(The House of Fame 19591960)
and all the houses corners are full of whispers and gossips
Although it is virtually impossible to prove that -ing event nominals did
not exist in the OE and ME periods, -ing instances like (12) and (13)
especially the existence of indenite and plural forms prove that -ing
result nominals were produced rather productively in OE and ME. Fur-
thermore, in these periods, the naming function of the derivational sux
-ing was active.
Finally, let us take a look at OE and ME conversion nominals. The cri-
teria in (9), especially (9d) and (9e), suggest that conversion nominals
started as result nominals and remain so in PE as well. As Kastovsky
(1985: 246253) shows, OE produced many conversion nominals like (14)
below, and they all had plural inected forms. Instances in (15ac) below
show that ME conversion nominals were indenite [cf. (9d)], took a plural
form [cf. (9e)], and occurred in a predicative position [cf. (9f )].
(14) Strong masculines: drepe slaying < drepan to strike
Weak masculines: hopa hope, expectation < hopian to hope
Strong feminines: faru journey, going < faran to go
Weak feminines: swinge/swynge strike < swingan to strike
Strong neuters: beorc bark(ing) < beorcan to bark
(Kastovsky 1985: 247248)
10. The data in (13) are taken from Yonekura (2006: 8587).
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change 121
(15) a. O Thow . . . which . . . tornest the heuene with a Rauessyng sweyh
Oh you, who turn the heaven with a powerful motion
(Biese 1941: 98)
But swich a cry and swich a wo they make,
But they made such a cry and woe
(The Canterbury Tales, Knights T. 900)
b. That for the swough and for the twigges,
This hous was also ful of gigges,
And also ful eek of chirkinges.
so that with the gusts and the whirring of the twigs, this house
was full of squeaks and creakings (The House of Fame 1942)
And with a sorwful noyse he seyde thus,
Among his sobbes and his sykes sore.
and he said in a husky voice amid his sighs and sobs
(Troilus and Criseyde IV375)
c. Quod tho this sely man, I nam no labbe.
The silly fellow answered, Im no blab.
(The Canterbury Tales, Millers T. 323)
In summary, this section has shown that the main function of the deri-
vational sux -ing has changed from naming in OE and ME to recatego-
rization in PE. To put it dierently, -ing nominals in OE and ME were
result nominals and did not maintain the argument structure of the base
verb, while -ing nominals in PE are event nominals and inherit the argu-
ment structure of the base verb. On the other hand, the derivational func-
tion of the verb-to-noun conversion, the naming function, has remained
the same from OE to PE, and it has invariably produced result nominals.
5. The Correlation between Compounding and Nominalization
We have seen that the possibility of SC in -ing has changed from OE to
PE and also that the function of the -ing nominalization has changed
from OE to PE. This section will establish a correlation between these
two historical changes.
Grimshaw (1990) and Oshita (1995) claim that the -ing nominalization
in PE derives an event nominal by suppressing the external argument of a
base verb, as depicted in (16) below, and an -ing deverbal (or synthetic)
compound occurs when an -ing event nominal projects its argument struc-
122 Akiko Nagano
ture thus formed word-internally. For example, the event nominal raising
has an argument structure like (17a) below, and it is realized either on the
phrasal level as in (17b) or word-internally as in (17c). In (16), x is an
external argument of the base verb, and y is an internal argument.
(16) a. base verb: <x <y> > !-ing nominal <Ev <x 0 <y> >
e.g., (Johns) observing of the phenomenon
b. base verb: <x> !-ing nominal <Ev <x 0 > >
e.g., (Johns) swimming
c. base verb: < <y> > !-ing nominal <Ev <y> >
e.g., the ripening of the fruit
(17) a. raising: <Ev <x 0 <y> >
b. the raising of the fund
c. fund-raising
This analysis accounts for why SC in -ing is basically impossible in PE. As
a result of the external-argument suppression, an -ing event nominal does
not inherit an external argument of the verb (i.e., the subject of the verb),
so it cannot be realized in an -ing compound. To use the example in (17),
the y argument of the event nominal raising can be realized in a com-
pound, such as fund-raising, but the suppressed x argument cannot. To
put it more simply, the -ing compounding in PE cannot incorporate a sub-
ject because it is sensitive to the organization of the argument structure of
an -ing event nominal.
On the other hand, -ing in OE and ME derives a result nominal as
shown in section 4, and, since a result nominal does not have an argument
structure, it enters a compound through the N-N compounding. For
example, the ME -ing nominal quakinge does not inherit the argument
structure of the base verb, so the -ing compound erthe-quakinge is formed
through the N-N compounding, simply connecting the two nouns erthe
and quakinge as in (18a) below. This compounding is no dierent from
the compounding of two simple nouns depicted in (18b), which produces
the ME compound nouns schoolmaster and bloodhound, for instance.
(18) a. [erthe]
N
[quakinge]
N
! [erthe-quakinge]
N
b. [school]
N
[master]
N
! [schoolmaster]
N
Signicantly, the N-N compounding is insensitive to argument structure
considerations, so a result nominal can be compounded not only with the
object (or internal argument) of a base verb but also with its subject (or
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change 123
external argument). This is why SC in -ing was allowed in OE and ME as
we saw in section 3. That is, it was allowed because the subject status of
the non-head noun had nothing to do with the N-N compounding.
Exactly the same account applies to the data of conversion. We saw
that, from OE to PE, deverbal compound nouns with a converted head
exhibit SC, as the data repeated in (19) show:
(19) ME: earthquake, earthquave, herte-bren heartburn, nosebleed,
sunne sine sunshine, sunrise, sunset, toth-ake tooth-ache
((6))
PE: baby-step, bee sting, earthquake, heart-ache, lion attack, the
Mitterand visit, mouse-squeak, rainfall, sunset, weather
change ((2a))
These instances can occur because converted nominals are invariably
result nominals, and, therefore, they form a compound through the N-N
compounding, just like OE and ME -ing nominals.
Finally, let us take a brief look at the -ing compound nouns in (3) in
section 2, which are repeated below.
(20) a. artery-hardening, fruit-ripening, gap-widening, muscle soften-
ing, poverty deepening, skin-darkening, world-attening ((3a))
b. airway-narrowing, hair-thinning, milk-souring, muscle thinning
((3b))
We saw that these SC -ing compound nouns are exceptionally allowed in
PE due to the lack of conversion counterparts. Under the present analysis,
it should be noticed that these PE -ing compounds are based on intransi-
tive verbs of the unaccusative type (Perlmutter 1978: 162163). For
instance, the head intransitive verbs ripen and widen in (20a) and narrow
and sour in (20b) are all unaccusative verbs, describing a natural, non-
volitional change of state. If we adopt the view that subjects of unaccu-
sative verbs are internal arguments,
11
we could say that these -ing
compounds are possible because the subject arguments are not external
arguments and are thus not suppressed by the -ing nominalization. The
relevant argument structure change is the one given in (16c).
In sum, this section has claimed that the possibility of SC depends on
the function of the nominalization involved. That is, event nominals do
not allow SC due to the organization of their argument structures, while
11. This view is rst proposed as the Unaccusativity Hypothesis by Perlmutter
(1978) and defended by Burzio (1986).
124 Akiko Nagano
result nominals allow it because they form a compound through the N-N
compounding. Due to the functional change of the sux -ing, PE -ing
compounds are of the former type, while OE and ME -ing compounds
are of the latter type. Since the function of the conversion nominalization
is invariably naming from OE to PE, compounds with converted heads
always allow SC.
6. One Factor for the Functional Change of the Derivational Sux -ing
In this last section, I am going to point out one factor that seems to under-
lie the functional change of the derivational sux -ing that we saw above.
One of the most signicant historical events for the derivational morphol-
ogy was the introduction of various Romance derivational suxes in the
ME period. This event changed not only the number of derivational suf-
xes in English but also the quality of Germanic suxes that OE origi-
nally had. For example, the corpus-based study by Dalton-Puer (1996)
reveals how the introduction of Romance suxes led to semantic special-
ization of Germanic suxes. Notice the two diagrams in Figure 1 below,
which are taken from Dalton-Puer (1996: 124). These represent form-
meaning mappings of nominalization suxes in two stages of ME: ME 1
in (a) from 1150 to 1250 and ME 3 in (b) from 1350 to 1420. On the left
side, we see newly introduced Romance suxes, while on the right side are
Germanic nominalization suxes. Specic meanings of nominalization
suxes are given in the middle,
12
and the line indicates that the sux in
12. The six categories in the middle stand for the following six semantic groups of
derived nominals:
(i) a. NActionis: Nomina Actionis act(ion) of V-ing
e.g., adaptation, resentment, arrival, departure, coverage, acceptance,
merger, launch
b. NEssendi: Nomina Essendi quality of being A
e.g., freshness, hostility, cruelty, elegance, accuracy, exactitude, precision
c. Instrumental: Instrumental Noun thing with which one V-s
e.g., eraser, perforator, stimulant, lift
d. Objective: Objective Noun thing that is V-ed
e.g., deposit, transplant, clipping, attachment, enclosure
e. Locative: Locative Noun place of V-ing/related to N
e.g., storage, anchorage, renery, dump
f. Collective: Collective Noun aggregate of Ns
e.g., jewellery, pottery, clientele, readerage/ship, priesthood
(Dalton-Puer 1996: 121)
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change 125
a. form-meaning mapping of nominalization suxes in ME 1
(11501250)
b. form-meaning mapping of nominalization suxes in ME 3
(13501420)
Figure 1.
126 Akiko Nagano
question can express that particular meaning. For instance, these diagrams
show that, in the ME 1 period, the Germanic sux -ness semantically de-
rived four types of abstract nouns, Nomina Actionis, Nomina Essendi,
Objective Noun, and Locative Noun, but, in the ME 3 period, it semanti-
cally specialized in the Nomina Essendi type.
13
This comparison of the two stages of ME reveals that, as more and
more Romance suxes were introduced, the form-meaning mapping on
the Germanic side became simpler. Each Germanic sux came to spe-
cialize in one or two meanings.
14
My suggestion is that this kind of semantic specialization in Germanic
suxes was closely related to the functional change of the Germanic sux
-ing from a naming sux to a recategorization sux. Although the seman-
tic variety of the sux -ing (UNG) itself did not change from ME 1 to
ME 3, the gradual enrichment of the form-meaning mapping on the
Romance side and its concomitant simplication on the Germanic side
suggest a general tendency through which a Romance sux became
semantically heterogeneous, while a Germanic sux became restricted to
one or two specic meanings. In the case of -ing, it came to specialize in
the action meaning (Nomina Actionis), as is evidenced by the productivity
13. Unlike the one in PE, the sux -ness in OE and ME derived a noun from a
verb (Kastovsky 1985: 244246, Dalton-Puer 1996: 111112). Below are
some examples of OE and ME deverbal -ness nominals.
(i) a. OE: blinness cessation (<blinnan to cease),
brecness breach (<brecan to break),
ymbceorfness circumcision (<ymbceorfan to circumcise)
(Kastovsky 1985: 244)
b. ME: ales(end)nesse deliverance, asolknesse laziness,
drednesse/dradnesse dreadfulness, druncnesse drunkenness,
forgefenesse/forgifnesse forgiveness
(Dalton-Puer 1996: 112)
14. The form-meaning mapping simplication in Germanic suxes is exhibited by
agentive noun suxes more explicitly than nominalization suxes. Dalton-
Puer (1996: section 7.4) shows that, in the ME 1 period (11501250), Ger-
manic agentive noun suxes (e.g., -ere, -end, -ling, -estre, -ild, -el ) expressed
various meanings including Agent, Instrument, Location, Female, Attributive,
Diminutive, and Pejorative, but such a complex form-meaning mapping on
the Germanic side was gradually simplied. In the ME 3 period (13501420),
Romance agentive noun suxes (e.g. -ard, -esse, -ary, -erel, -our) began to
exhibit a similar complex mapping instead. For the relevant diagrams of the
form-meaning mappings of agentive noun suxes, see Dalton-Puer (1996:
161).
Subject Compounding and a Functional Change 127
change of each semantic group of -ing; in OE, the sux -ing productively
derived not only action nouns but also objective/instrumental/locative
nouns (Kastovsky 1985: 241243), but, in ME, -ing instances as action
nouns became dominant, and fewer and fewer instances of the other
semantic types were produced. In fact, according to Dalton-Puer (1996:
93), the ME -ing instances of the semantic groups other than the action
group can be listed exhaustively as follows:
(21) a. Result Ns: fyndynges ndings, grauyngges diggings, oringes
oerings, peyntynggs paintings, ritinges rules, schauynges
shavings, wrytynges writings
b. Locative Ns: hidinges hiding place, nooks
c. Collective Ns: bygynnynges beginnings, doinges doings,
noryssynges nutriment, worchynges workings
d. Material Ns: enarmynges armor, norysschynges
nourishment
The fact that the meaning of -ing became restricted to pure action is
basically equivalent to its functional change from a naming sux to a
recategorization sux. Then it seems safe to say that one factor for the
functional change of -ing lies in the introduction of various Romance
suxes in the ME period, and a hypothesis such as the one below could
be advanced.
(22) With new Romance suxes taking on a naming function, -ing,
originally a naming sux itself, gradually developed into a
recategorization sux due to its high productivity as well as its
parallel development as an inectional (gerundive) sux.
OE originally had several nominalization suxes, but why did the sux
-ing, instead of others, develop into a recategorization sux? This ques-
tion must have to do with the high productivity of this sux and its
development as an inectional or gerundive sux, as pointed out in the
hypothesis (22). Its detailed examination, however, must be left for
another occasion.
7. Concluding Remarks
This paper has attributed the changing possibility of SC to the functional
change of the derivational sux -ing. Compared with the development of
128 Akiko Nagano
-ing as an inectional or gerundive sux, the development of -ing as
a derivational recategorization sux has received little attention in the
literature and awaits much more detailed examination. Traditionally,
the rise of the gerund has been accounted for as follows: the sux of the
present participle, -inde, was morphologically and phonologically merged
into -ing, the derivational sux of the action nominal, with the result that
the former gave the latter some verbal properties (Mustanoja 1960: 566
573). Although this account concerns the development of the so-called
verbal gerund from the so-called nominal gerund, it might also be
conceivable that the functional change of -ing from a naming sux to
a recategorization sux as well beneted from the merger of -ing with
the present participle sux. This functional change is equivalent to the
increase of verbal properties of the -ing nominal, and in this sense, it is
on the same diachronic line as the development of the (verbal) gerund.
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