| Abstract |
In Present-day English, the 'hear tell' type (i.e. the construction in which the subject accusative of the ‘accusative with infinitive’ is not expressed; hence the [-Subject] type) is ungrammatical wi...th the exception of some idiomatic expressions, e.g. ‘hear tell’, ‘make believe’. I’ve often heard tell of the wonderful parties she gives, but I’ve never been invited. In Old and Middle English, however, the subject accusative is often left unexpressed, as in he het hie hon on heam gealgum ‘he ordered [someone] to hang them on the high gallows’ (Mitchell 1968 : §.161) [w]e wari het hire kasten in cwartrne ’The wicked man commanded [someone] to cast her into the prison’ According to Fischer (1989), ‘the change in word order that English underwent between the OE and ME periods’ (p.205) (i.e. SOV →SVO) exerted a great influence on the [-Subject] type. With her hypothesis in mind, this paper examines the [-Subject] type in the early 13th century, based on a corpus of Ancrene Wisse (Parts 6 and 7) and the Katherine Group. Among our findings are : (1) [-Subject]: [+Subject] =44(28%): 115(72%) (2)The Number of occurrences of the [-Subject] type with each verb bidden(8) demen(1) dihten(1) haten(21) heren(1) iseon(1) leoten(10) makien(1) (3)bidden [-Subject]89%(8) [+Subject]11%(1) haten [-Subject]84%(21) [+Subject]16%(4) leoten [-Subject]34%(10) [+Subject]66%(19) iseon [-Subject]11%(1) [+Subject]89%(8) makien [-Subject]3%(1) [+Subject]97%(33) (4) The Word order of the [-Subject] type (when the Infinitive is transitive) (a) Verb Infinitive NP 32(80%) Verb NP Infinitive 6(15%) NP Verb Infinitive 2(5%) (b) Verb Infinitive NP : Verb NP Infinitive = 84% : 16% Fischer (1989 : p.207) argues that because of the new word order (i.e. SVO), ‘the pressure to interpret the NP before the infinitive as subject became increasingly strong, so that some change became necessary’. One of the options that she mentions is the construction in which the NP is placed after the Infinitive. From (4b) above, it may safely be said that the new order ‘Verb Infinitive NP’ was by far the commoner in the early 13th-century English. Another option is the passive infinitive. In our corpus, it occurs only twice in the ‘accusative with infinitive’ construction.show more
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