Studies in Linguistic Variation and Change 3 Studies in Linguistic Variation and Change 3 : Corpus-based Research in English Syntax and Lexis Edited by Fabienne Toupin, Sylvain Gatelais and Ileana Sasu Studies in Linguistic Variation and Change 3: Corpus-based Research in English Syntax and Lexis Edited by Fabienne Toupin, Sylvain Gatelais and Ileana Sasu This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by Sylvain Gatelais, Ileana Sasu, Fabienne Toupin and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-4537-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-4537-3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword and Acknowledgements ............................................................ vii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Sylvain Gatelais, Ileana Sasu and Fabienne Toupin Part I: Morphosyntactic Variation in Two Different Varieties of English Subject-Verb Concord in the Letters of Virginian Soldiers during the Civil War ............................................................................................... 3 Gaëlle Le Corre The Distribution of the Definite Article in Early Middle English: Explaining the Variation ............................................................................ 41 Raffaela Baechler Part II: Developments and Alternations in Medieval English What the Emergent DP Brought About: The Emergence of the Double Object Construction in English .................................................................. 89 Fuyo Osawa Word Order Change, Stress Shift and Old French Loanwords in Middle English ..................................................................................................... 111 Harumasa Miyashita & Hisao Tokizaki The Vulnerability of Old English Verb Semantic Classes in Middle English ..................................................................................................... 133 Richard Ingham Information Structural Effects on Direct Object Scrambling Constructions ........................................................................................... 153 Yana Chankova Contributors ............................................................................................. 177 FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This volume consists of a selection of papers from the Fifth International Biennial Conference on the Diachrony of English (CBDA-5) held in Tours, France, in July 2017. CBDA-5 was dedicated to the memory of Professor Xavier Dekeyser, who had so kindly and unfailingly supported CBDA since the beginning. CBDA is a relative newcomer to the world of internationally recognized conferences addressing the history of the English language. The main objective of the conference, created in 2008, is to provide colleagues working in France and abroad with an opportunity to explore linguistic phenomena from a diachronic perspective and to discuss their theoretical implications. A second goal is to awaken interest in France in the study of English from a variationist perspective, across a number of fields including dialectology, historical and socio-historical linguistics. Since 2008, CBDA has been organized every two years alternately by the universities of Amiens, Tours and Reims-Champagne-Ardenne (on the Troyes campus). Ever since its creation, CBDA has enjoyed the financial backing of two research groups: LLL (Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique, UMR 7270) and Corpus (EA 4295), joined more recently by CIRLEP (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches sur les Langues et la Pensée, EA 4299). Their precious support is gratefully acknowledged here. More specifically, concerning the organization of CBDA-5, the organizers wish to express their gratitude to the LLL team and to the University of Tours for their help and support. In all, some 30 papers were presented at CBDA-5. The abstracts are available on the conference website (www.cbdaconference.org/). After a process of double-blind peer review, 6 of these, duly revised and reshaped as full articles, appear in the present volume, while other papers might have been published elsewhere. The editors extend their warmest thanks to Dominique Boulonnais, Hubert Cuyckens, Catherine Delesse, David Denison, Sylvain Gatelais, Élise Louviot, Philip Miller, Ayumi Miura, Olivier Simonin, and Olga Timofeeva for all their tireless work in the process of reviewing the papers. Their suggestions and corrections have not only facilitated the editors’ tasks but were also greatly appreciated by the contributors to this viii Foreword and Acknowledgements volume. We are also indebted to all the contributors for their patient cooperation. Last but not least, we should like to thank Adam Rummens at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for the assistance he gave us during the preparation of the manuscript for publishing. Tours, November 2019 The Editors Professor Xavier Dekeyser in 2000 at the University of Antwerp INTRODUCTION Since the 1990s, the development of corpus-based linguistics has provided historical linguists with new means of investigation, thus opening up new perspectives for researchers and enabling them to base their conclusions on much larger sets of data. This volume reflects a diversity of approaches to corpora. Some of the authors have resorted to wide-ranging lexicographic sources (such as the Middle English Dictionary). Others find it more relevant to make the best of the new opportunities offered by morphosyntactically-tagged corpora such as the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English or the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus. Yet another contributor to this volume has set up her own corpus by putting together various documents drawn from digital sources or gathered in archive centers. In all cases, it appears that in-depth observation of genuine, large or very large sets of data provides the basis for the linguists’ conclusions. The first section of the book will be of particular interest to those interested in syntactic and morphosyntactic variation in English at different periods of its history, and in what we as linguists can learn from observing variation at work, both from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. Gaëlle Le Corre is concerned with southern American vernacular English. She examines variation in subject-verb agreement in letters written by low-ranking, semi-literate soldiers from Virginia during the Civil War. These letters are an invaluable source of information about the language spoken by the less literate white population during the 19th century, but have so far been neglected by linguists. Yet speakers from Virginia played a key role in the development of the southern varieties of English. The author focuses on three aspects of variation, viz. the absence of verbal -s with third-person singular subjects (a phenomenon known as the Northern Subject Rule), the generalization of verbal -s in the present tense, and the was/were competition in the past tense use of be. Gaëlle Le Corre’s aim is to answer two questions: i) Are the variations found in her corpus similar to those observed in other studies on 19th-century southern