Referential Null Subjects in Early English (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics)

Cover
Referential Null Subjects in Early English
Copyright
Contents
Series Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
	Figures
	Tables
List of Abbreviations
1: Introduction
	1.1 Background
		1.1.1 Referential null subjects in Old Germanic
		1.1.2 Referential null subjects in Old English
	1.2 Contribution of the book
	1.3 Scope and definitions
	1.4 Data material and method
		1.4.1 Data collection
		1.4.2 Representativeness
		1.4.3 Old English
		1.4.4 Later stages of early English
	1.5 Outline of the book
2: Referential null subjects in Old English
	2.1 Introduction
	2.2 Three types of subjectless structure
		2.2.1 Imperative-like’ subjunctives
		2.2.2 Non-overt subject relatives in naming structures with hatan
	2.3 Referential null subjects in Old English
		2.3.1 Null subjects in Old English prose: an overview
		2.3.2 Null subjects in Old English poetry: an overview
	2.4 Is Old English a canonical pro-drop language?
3: Do Anglian dialects of Old English have a partial pro-drop property?
	3.1 Introduction
	3.2 The dialect-split hypothesis
	3.3 An initial assessment of the dialect-split hypothesis
	3.4 Null subjects according to dialect
		3.4.1 Prose
		3.4.2 Poetry
	3.5 Null subjects according to genre
	3.6 Null subjects according to period
		3.6.1 Prose
		3.6.2 Poetry
	3.7 Null subjects according to translation status
		3.7.1 Prose
		3.7.2 Poetry
	3.8 Assessing the dialect-split hypothesis
	3.9 Concluding summary
4: The morphosyntactic characteristics of null subjects in Old English
	4.1 Introduction
	4.2 Null subjects according to clause type
	4.3 Null subjects according to person and number
	4.4 Null subjects according to the position of the finite verb
	4.5 Modelling null subjects in Old English according to linguistic and non-linguistic variables
	4.6 Concluding summary
5: What could have sanctioned null subjects in Old English?
	5.1 Introduction
	5.2 Referent identification: antecedent relations and accessibility
		5.2.1 Antecedentless null subjects
		5.2.2 Antecedent accessibility
	5.3 Two generative proposals evaluated: Aboutness topics and verbal inflections
	5.4 Closing discussion
		5.4.1 A suggestion: null subjects in Old English as argument ellipsis
	5.5 Summary
6: The long-term diachrony of referential null subjects in early English
	6.1 Introduction
	6.2 Referential null subjects in Middle English
		6.2.1 Null subjects in Middle English according to text, genre, and period
		6.2.2 Morphosyntactic characteristics of null subjects in Middle English
		6.2.3 Modelling null subjects in Middle English
	6.3 Referential null subjects in EarlyModern English
		6.3.1 Referential null subjects in Early Modern English according to text and period
		6.3.2 Morphosyntactic characteristics of null subjects in Early Modern English
		6.3.3 Modelling null subjects in Early Modern English
	6.4 The long-term diachrony of null subjects in early English: correlation and regression
	6.5 Concluding discussion
	6.6 Summary
7: Conclusions
References
Index