09 Philosophisch-historische Fakultät
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/10
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Item Open Access Tolerating subject-experiencers? Yang’s Tolerance Principle applied to psych verbs under contact in Middle English(2022) Trips, Carola; Rainsford, ThomasThis article investigates the acquisition of psych verbs in diachrony by applying Yang’s (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency principles. It has been observed that psych verbs change from expressing the EXPERIENCER as object to expressing it as subject cross-linguistically. According to van Gelderen (2018) and others, this development has also taken place in the history of English. What is much less well-known, however, is that a considerable number of Old French psych verbs were copied to Middle English. Using lexicon-based and corpus-based data, we will apply Yang’s (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles to evaluate historical “tipping points” in the development of the psych verb class, i.e. examine whether either amuse-type or admire-type argument structures were productive in Middle English. Since subject-EXPERIENCERS were commonly used with intransitive and reflexive constructions we will further investigate whether a more general rule that any psych verb may take a subject-EXPERIENCER passed the productivity threshold. We will show that this was indeed the case in Middle English and that the copying of Old French verbs accelerated this development.Item Open Access Syllable structure and prosodic words in Early Old French(2020) Rainsford, ThomasThis paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the phonotactics of syllable rhymes based on all unique tokens in two Early Old French texts. Based on the data from this single, conservative variety, I develop Jacobs’ (1994) proposal that the Old French stress rule is underlyingly trochaic and that word- inal stress is caused by the presence of an empty-headed final syllable. I argue that this analysis can only be valid while words with final stress systematically end in a consonant that can, and often must, be parsed as the onset to an empty-headed syllable. Although this is not the case in most later varieties of Old French, the prediction is borne out by our data. I conclude by examining the implications of this analysis for the accentuation and phonotactics of monosyllables and for the study of prosodic change in Old French.