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6.1 ``Doubly-filled COMP'' sentences.

Certain additional pieces of grammatical evidence support the hypothesis that Benet and the southern texts differ in the syntactic domain of V2. The first is provided by the presence of ``doubly-filled COMP'' sentences of a type also attested in the modern Germanic languages, as well as in other languages, including Latin and modern dialects of Spanish (Iatridou & Kroch 1992). These are subordinate clauses introduced by an overt complementizer, in which a constituent has been preposed to the immediate left of C-zero, as in (16):

There are 10 examples of this sort in Benet, while in the much more extensive Midlands and southern material in our corpus, there are only two possible cases, one of which is doubtful. The Benet examples are all cases where the clause in which the topicalization occurs is ungoverned -- hence, not a CP-recursion environment. Indeed, the examples look very much like certain cases in Bavarian described by Bayer 1983 and Fanselow 1987.[18] The following examples, quoted by Santorini (1989) in her discussion of these cases, illustrate the Bavarian construction:

The most straightforward analysis of the Benet examples is the one given by Fanselow for Bavarian, under which the boldface constituent has been preposed into the specifier position of the complementizer of its clause.[19] The fact that movement to Spec,CP occurs in non-CP-recursion subordinate clauses with filled complementizers in this text makes it unlikely that Spec,IP could be a subordinate clause topic position in this dialect in the way that it is in Old English. We would not expect two topic positions to coexist for a single clause type. Hence the Benet dialect must be strictly CP-V2.

Since the Benet text is the translation of a Latin original and since Latin allowed doubly-filled COMPs, we might think that the presence of the construction in Benet reflected the literary influence of Latin.[20] If so, its occurrence would tell us little or nothing about the nature of V2 in the indigenous northern language. However, it is unlikely that the construction reflects Latin influence, and for two reasons. First, the conditions on the preposing are not the same in Latin as they are in Benet. In Latin, unlike in Benet or in Bavarian but just as in certain modern Romance dialects, the preposing may occur in governed subordinate clauses rather than being limited to ungoverned ones. Second, none of the examples in Benet is a translation of a Latin doubly-filled COMP sentence. Indeed, the Benet text is a very free rendering of St. Benedict's Rule, with much omitted and with considerable commentary, not identified as such, that is absent from both the Latin original and the Old English version. As it happens, almost all of our examples come from such sections of commentary and, therefore, are not translations of any material in the originals. None of the examples corresponds to any sentence in the Latin or Old English versions that could have served as a model for its syntax.[21]



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Next: 6.2 A comparative idiom. Up: 6 Further grammatical comparisons Previous: 6 Further grammatical comparisons



Anthony Kroch
Wed Jan 10 09:14:48 EST 1996