CAUSAL CONNECTIVES IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF ENGLISH: A STUDY IN DIACHRONIC SYNTAX

This study seeks to substantiate the proposal that the source of new (complex) syntactic structure is to be found in strategies for organizing information at the level of discourse. A detailed investigation is made of the origin and early development of certain new ways of forming complex sentences in the early history of English: adverbial subordinate clauses with causal meaning, formed with the OE preposition for 'on account of', a demonstrative pronoun, and an adjoined clause marked by the particle {dollar}rho e{dollar}. On the basis of this case study, and what is known about grammaticalization processes in other areas of the grammar, a theoretical framework for analyzing grammaticalization of discourse into syntax is developed. It is demonstrated that this framework provides a means for gleaning information about the development and origin of syntactic structures, on the basis of textual evidence, even when the initial stages of the process may seem to antedate the historical record, and when the evidence does not fall neatly into stages simply by date of text. In some cases rankings of constructions and forms on a synchronic grammaticalization scale can be argued to represent a historical progression by using the theory of grammaticalization.; Both the for PP connectives and clauses marked by {dollar}rho e{dollar} alone restrictively modify aspects of the main clause situation in a way that involves information from the discourse context, function characterized using Larson's (1983) model of restrictive modification as 'evaluation in a situation'. This additional parameter that the OE system marks account for the distinction between {dollar}rho e{dollar} and the OE complementizer {dollar}rho{dollar}aet 'that'. Historically, the complex structures are seen to proceed from initial reliance on semantic and pragmatic properties of forms, to reliance on the syntactic devices of adjunction, embedding, and the constituent marking property of complementizers. Crucial in the change process is the notion of 'organizational ambiguity'. Parallels between information structure at the two levels enable a syntactic analysis of an originally discourse strategy to be made. Conflict between the linearization imposed by the discourse strategy and the normal ordering of old and new information in sentences motivates further syntacticization.; The study concludes that the theory of grammaticalization contributes to our understanding of the origin and development of syntax by providing a basis for describing constraints on the change process. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)...