A quantitative study of empty referential subjects in Old English prose and poetry

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a corpus‐based, quantitative investigation of the non‐expression of referential pronominal subjects in a wide selection of Old English prose and poetic texts. The paper demonstrates that ‘empty’ referential subjects are significantly more frequent in Old English poetry as opposed to the prose. This result may contribute to explaining the widely differing assessments found in the literature concerning the grammaticality of empty subjects in Old English. It is also shown for both genres that the occurrence of such subjects correlates with the date of composition and, to a weaker degree, with the translation‐status of the analysed texts. These results weaken Walkden's (2012) dialect‐split hypothesis somewhat, since the asymmetry between West Saxon and Anglian/Anglian‐influenced texts discussed by Walkden may at least partially be explained by the genre, period and translation‐status of the texts. The paper also shows that the differences in frequency between prose and poetry cannot be explained by morphosyntactic factors such as clause type and person/number features, since the empty subjects form similar patterns of distribution across these variables in both genres. It is also argued that verbal agreement cannot explain the occurrence of empty referential subjects in Old English prose or poetry.

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