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Published 2000.
This book brings together several seemingly distinct phenomena in the history of English: the introduction of special reflexive pronouns (e.g. me), the loss of verbal agreement and pro-drop, and the disappearance of morphological ...
Published 2000.
This book brings together several seemingly distinct phenomena in the history of English: the introduction of special reflexive pronouns (e.g. me), the loss of verbal agreement and pro-drop, and the disappearance of morphological Case. It provides vast numbers of examples from Old and Middle English texts showing a person split between first, second, and third person pronouns. Extending an analysis by Reinhart & Reuland, the author argues that the 'strength' of certain pronominal features (Case, person, number) differs cross-linguistically and that parametric variation accounts for the changes in English. The framework used is Minimalist, and Interpretable and Uninterpretable features are the key to explaining the change from a synthetic to an analytic language.
