Null subjects in the Lindisfarne Gospels as evidence for syntactic variation in Old English
George Walkden
March 2016 

This paper assesses the evidence for null subjects in Old English, demonstrating that in the Old English gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels subjects are omitted in a way not found in classical West Saxon texts. The obvious hypothesis – that this difference is simply due to the nature of the text as a gloss of a Latin original, and thus tells us nothing about the syntax of Old English – is unlikely to be correct, since null subjects occur frequently only in the third person, not in the first and second persons. In Latin null subjects are permitted and occur in all of these contexts without restriction. The omitted subjects in the Lindisfarne gloss thus seem to represent a genuine (Northumbrian) Old English syntactic possibility; support for this conclusion is drawn from a new quantitative study of the Gospel of John. The results of the study therefore indicate that a text such as Aldred’s gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels, despite its glossal nature, can contribute to our understanding of the comparative syntax of Old English dialects if appropriate caution is employed.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/002734 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Julia Fernández Cuesta & Sara M. Pons Sanz (eds.), The Old English glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels: language, author and context. Buchreihe der Anglia. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
keywords:	null subjects, old english, latin, lindisfarne gospels, dialectology, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [July 2015]
Downloaded:	949 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]