Prosody, Topicalization andV2 in the History of English
and French
Anthony Kroch and Beatrice SantoriniUniversity of Pennsylvania
September 2010
Fourth Workshop on Prosody, Syntax andInformation Structure (WPSI4)
University of Delaware
1
The decline of topicalization in English and its prosodic motivation
2
The history of topicalization in English (Speyer 2008)
• Why does topicalization decline in Middle English but not disappear? If the change a parametric one, it should go to completion. Otherwise, topicalization, a clear case of stylistic variation might be expected to be stable in frequency over time.
• This question has an answer in the specific interactionbetween parametric settings and stylistic variation in the history of English.
3
• Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition. University of Pennsylvania, CD-ROM, second edition, 2000.
• Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. Oxford Text Archive, first edition, 2003.
• Anthony Kroch, Beatrice Santorini, and Lauren Delfs. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. University of Pennsylvania, CD-ROM, first edition, 2004.
• Ann Taylor, Arja Nurmi, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Terttu Nevalainen. Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Oxford Text Archive, first edition, 2006.
English Data Sources
4
(2)!And he seide to hem, An enemy hath do˜ this thing.! ! Wycliffe Bible ca. 1380
(1)! "# cwæ$ h%, "æt dyde unhold mann.! ! West Saxon Gospels ca. 1000
An illustrative case in the New Testament Matthew 13.28
5
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
OE (Early) OE (Late) 1151-1250 1251-1350 1351-1420 1421-1500 1501-1569 1570-1639 1639-1710
% T
opic
aliz
ed
Date
Decline of direct object topicalization in English
West Saxon Gospels
Wycliffe Bible
6
96 A CORPU S STUDY OF THE VORFELD
Table 4.2: Summary of Vorfeld occupation of arguments.
Vorfeld Prop est (%)
Argument yes no lo pt hi
subject 43 523 18 597 69.7 70.1 70.4direct object 3 418 20 432 13.9 14.3 14.8indirect object 38 815 3.2 4.5 6.1
Note: subject = SU, direct object = OBJ1 + OBJ1 VC, indirect object = OBJ2 + OBJ2 VC.
Table 4.3: Classification after part-of-speech and syntactic category.
Category CGN labels
nominal NP, N, VNW, MWU (when proper names)prepositional PP, VZverbal TI, OTI, AHI, INF, WW, PPARTclausal CP, WHSUB, WHQ, WHREL, REL, SVAN, SMAIN, SSUB, SV1
Note: See Appendix A for explanation of the CGN POS/Cat-labels. Conjunctions/lists of onecategory are also assigned that category. Other POS-types (notably adjectives and adverbs) wereassigned to a rest category.
other things questionnaire data. We will see in later sections that there is more to thedifference between direct and indirect objects than meets the eye, however. If we take theeffect of definiteness on Vorfeld occupation into account, the difference between directobjects and indirect objects is not as big as Table 4.2 suggests.
Subjects and objects can be a of a wide variety of categories. We can divide the dataof Table 4.2 into four main categories: nominal, prepositional, verbal and clausal. Thetranslation between CGN-tags and the four categories is given in Table 4.3. The categoriesnominal and prepositional should be self-explanatory. The difference between verbaland clausal is that clausal constituents are finite, and contain all arguments of the verb,whereas verbal constituents are non-finite or do not contain all arguments of the verb.Tables 4.4–4.6 show how each of the grammatical functions breaks down into thesecategories. Below, I will illustrate the data with some examples for each grammaticalfunction. The nominal data will considered in more detail in the section on definiteness(Section 4.3).
Subjects Vorfeld occupation of subjects per category is detailed in Table 4.4. Theproportion of subjects in the Vorfeld is high in each category, although clausal subjectsappear to have a slightly reduced chance of appearing in the Vorfeld.
96 A CORPU S STUDY OF THE VORFELD
Table 4.2: Summary of Vorfeld occupation of arguments.
Vorfeld Prop est (%)
Argument yes no lo pt hi
subject 43 523 18 597 69.7 70.1 70.4direct object 3 418 20 432 13.9 14.3 14.8indirect object 38 815 3.2 4.5 6.1
Note: subject = SU, direct object = OBJ1 + OBJ1 VC, indirect object = OBJ2 + OBJ2 VC.
Table 4.3: Classification after part-of-speech and syntactic category.
Category CGN labels
nominal NP, N, VNW, MWU (when proper names)prepositional PP, VZ
verbal TI, OTI, AHI, INF, WW, PPART
clausal CP, WHSUB, WHQ, WHREL, REL, SVAN, SMAIN, SSUB, SV1
Note: See Appendix A for explanation of the CGN POS/Cat-labels. Conjunctions/lists of onecategory are also assigned that category. Other POS-types (notably adjectives and adverbs) wereassigned to a rest category.
other things questionnaire data. We will see in later sections that there is more to thedifference between direct and indirect objects than meets the eye, however. If we take theeffect of definiteness on Vorfeld occupation into account, the difference between directobjects and indirect objects is not as big as Table 4.2 suggests.
Subjects and objects can be a of a wide variety of categories. We can divide the dataof Table 4.2 into four main categories: nominal, prepositional, verbal and clausal. Thetranslation between CGN-tags and the four categories is given in Table 4.3. The categoriesnominal and prepositional should be self-explanatory. The difference between verbaland clausal is that clausal constituents are finite, and contain all arguments of the verb,whereas verbal constituents are non-finite or do not contain all arguments of the verb.Tables 4.4–4.6 show how each of the grammatical functions breaks down into thesecategories. Below, I will illustrate the data with some examples for each grammaticalfunction. The nominal data will considered in more detail in the section on definiteness(Section 4.3).
Subjects Vorfeld occupation of subjects per category is detailed in Table 4.4. Theproportion of subjects in the Vorfeld is high in each category, although clausal subjectsappear to have a slightly reduced chance of appearing in the Vorfeld.
Frequency of direct object topicalization in modern spoken Dutch (Bouma 2008)
7
Evolution of PP preposing in English
0
10
20
30
40
50
OE (Early) OE (Late) 1151-1250 1251-1350 1351-1420 1421-1500 1501-1569 1570-1639 1639-1710
% P
repose
d
Date
8
0
15
30
45
60
75
90
OE (Early) OE (Late) 1151-1250 1251-1350 1351-1420 1421-1500 1501-1569 1570-1639 1639-1710
% P
repose
d
Date
Evolution of adverb fronting in English
locative adverbs
temporal adverbs
9
Correlation between frequencies of object topicalizationand of V2 in Middle English texts (Wallenberg 2007)
10
Clash avoidance
• The type of topicalization that declines:
(1) The newspaper John read; the novel Mary did.
• The type of topicalization that doesn’t:
(2) The newspaper I read; the novel I didn’t.
(Compare: The newspaper read John.)!
!"
"
!"
!" !"
11
Subject type in sentences with topicalized objects
Subject type in sentences with in situ objects
Distribution of subject types in a corpus of topicalized and non-topicalized sentences
in Modern English natural speech(Prince/Ward corpus)
personal pronoun demonstrative pronoun full noun phrase
140 20 142
46.4% 6.6% 47%
personal pronoun demonstrative pronoun full noun phrase
181 2 17
90.5% 1% 8.5%
12
Translating German topicalized arguments intoEnglish in three modern German novels
[by Böll, Dürrenmatt and Grass]
Topicalized to topicalized:
G: Mahlkes Haupt bedeckte dieser Hut besonders peinlich.
E: On Mahlke’s head this hat made a particularly painful impression.
Topicalized to non-topicalized:
G: Zu den sechs kamen noch drei weitere.
E: Three others joined these six in the afternoon.
13
2nd accent on the German
subjectaccent elsewhere
topicalization in the English translation
00
3131
no topicalization in the English
2525
100100
Accent placement and topicalization frequencies in translating German topicalized arguments into English
14
Experiments on clash avoidance in German and English (Speyer 2008)
15
(1) Rick likes them ! Rick ! likes them
(2) Rick they like ! Rick ! they like
Repairing clashes
Selkirk (1984) introduces a silent grid position into sentences with adjacent accents. This option turns out to be freely available in SV(O) sentences like (1) but not in OSV sentences like (2):
!" !"
!" !"
16
(2)!a. SV:!Pitt bastelt gerne (aber Bert nicht gerne)! P tinkers gladly but B not
! b. SO/OS:!Pitt mag Blau (und Bert Gelb) ! P likes blue and B yellow
(1)!a. SV:!Pitt bastelt gerne (aber Bert brüllt gerne)! P tinkers gladly but B shouts gladly
! b. SO/OS: ...!dass Pitt Blau mag (und Bert Gelb) ! that P blue likes and B yellow
Clash and non-clash environments in German
17
(2)!a. SV:!Pitt tinkers easily (but Bert not so easily)
! b. SO:!Pitt likes blue (and Bert yellow)
(1)!a. SV:!Pitt tinkers easily (but Bert shouts easily)
! b. OS: Blue Pitt likes (and yellow Bert)
Clash and non-clash environments in English
18
Effect of clash avoidance on the insertion of pauses into read sentences in German (n=80)
0
25
50
75
100
125
150
175
200
225
A1A2 A1a2 a1A2 a1a2
pause lengthpause length vs a1a2
A = accented! 1 = first constituent (S,O or V)a = unaccented! 2 = second constituent
19
Effect of clash avoidance on the insertion of pauses into read OSV sentences in English (n=60)
-5
20
45
70
95
120
145
170
195
220
245
OS Os oS os
pause lengthpause length vs os
O,S = accented! o,s = unaccented
20
Effect of clash avoidance on the insertion of pauses into read SVO sentences in English (n=60)
0
25
50
75
100
125
150
175
200
225
SV Sv sV sv
pause lengthpause length vs sv
S,V = accented! s,v = unaccented
21
0
123
245
OS os SV sv0
63
127
190
Differential effect of clash on pause length in English OSV and SV sentences
NB: German shows no effect in such cases.
49% of OS
70% of SV
22
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
No potential clash Potential clash
Effect of clash avoidance on sentence formulation in German (n=180)
Unmarked order
Material inserted
Sentence reformulated
23
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
No potential clash Potential clash
Unmarked order
Effect of clash avoidance on sentence formulation in English (n=96)
Sentence reformulated
24
focus on subject
focus on tensed verb
focus elsewhere
N (total= 207) 113 29 65
% inversion 89 14 71
% of cases 55 14 31
Distribution of contrastive topicalization by focus (second accent) placement in Middle English
focus position
distribution of cases
25
me1 me2 me3 me4 eme1 eme2 eme3
# sent. with DO 2855 1300 4615 2271 3229 3584 2544
# topicalized 219 69 145 66 67 82 28
% topicalized 7.7 5.3 3.1 2.9 2.1 2.3 1.1
# V2 162 34 89 46 35 27 4
% V2 74 49.3 61.4 70.2 52.2 32.9 14.3
sentence type
timeperiod
Frequency of matrix clause topicalization and V2 in sentences with full DP subjects in Middle and Early
Modern English
26
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1151-1250 1251-1350 1351-1420 1421-1500 1501-1569 1570-1639 1639-1710
% V
2
Date
Rate of V2 loss in English with topicalizedobjects and PPs
topicalized objects
topicalized PPs
27
me1 me2 me3 me4 eme1 eme2 eme3
# sent. with DO 2855 1300 4615 2271 3229 3584 2544
# topicalized 219 69 145 66 67 82 28
topicalization rate
7.7 5.3 3.1 2.9 2.1 2.3 1.1
would have been topicalized
219 100 354 174 248 275 195
actual rate of V2 74 49.3 61.4 70.2 52.2 32.9 14.3
corrected rate V2 74.0 34.0 25.1 26.4 14.1 9.8 2.1
sentence type
time period
Corrected frequency of matrix clause topicalization and V2 in Middle and Early Modern English
28
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1151-1250 1251-1350 1351-1420 1421-1500 1501-1569 1570-1639 1639-1710
% V
2
Date
Rate of V2 loss in English corrected for clash avoidance
topicalized objectscorrected
topicalized PPs
29
The loss of topicalization and of V2 in the history of French
30
• France Martineau, et. al. Corpus MCVF, (Projet Modéliser le changement: les voies du français.) University of Ottawa, CD-ROM, 2009.
• Anthony Kroch and Beatrice Santorini. Penn Supplement to the Corpus MCVF. University of Pennsylvania, CD-ROM, 2010.
• Total Corpus consists of:
French Data Sources
1. Twelve Old French texts (1000 - 1300).2. Six Middle French texts (1301 - 1500).3. Three Early Modern French texts from (1501 - 1600).
31
Decline of direct object topicalization in French, excluding early Old French
0
4
8
12
16
20
24
28
32
36
1101-1200 1201-1300 1301-1400 1401-1500 1501-1550 1551-1600
% T
opic
aliz
ed
all subjects
all overt subjects
32
Object topicalization with V2 in Oldand Middle French
(1)!l'estreu li tint sun uncle Guinemer! the stirrup him held his uncle Guinemer! Roland 27.329
(2)!messe e matines ad li reis escultet! mass and matins has the king heard! Roland 11.139
(3)!si grand paour avoit que a pou qu'il ne mouroit! so great fear he-had that at little that he ne died! CNNA 51.488
33
Object topicalization with V2 and pronoun subjects in Old and Middle French
(1)!Espaigne vus durat il en fiet! Spain you will-give he in fief! Roland, 36.446
(2)!chars avoient ils assés! meat had they enough! Froissart, 135.569
(3)!une chose! ont-ilz! ! ! asez! ! honneste! one thing! have-they! enough honest! Commynes, 120.1634
34
Object topicalization with V3 and pronoun subjects in Middle French
(1)!aultre remyde je n&y voy! other remedy I not there see! XV Joies, 111v.1209
(2)!deux chose je diray de luy! two things I will-say of him! Commynes, 38.478
(3)!nul enfant il n&ot onques eu de sa fenme! no child he not-had ever had of his wife! Froissart, 462.6477
35
Adverb preposing with V2 in Oldand Middle French
(1)!Er matin sedeit li emperere suz l&umbre! yesterday morning sat the emperor under the shade! Roland 29.363
(2)!or est ele bien venue! now is she welcome! Yvain 43.1440
(3)!ben l&entendit il arcevesques Turpin! well it understands the archebishop Turpin! Roland 96.1237
36
Adverb preposing with V3 in Oldand Middle French
(1)!unkes nuls hom ne vit tel ajustee.! never no man not saw such joust! Roland 238.3299
(2)!premierement il devient taverniers! first he becomes innkeeper! Somme 47.306
(3)!doucement li oisel chantoient ! sweetly the birds sang! Yvain 15.451
37
Frequency of V2 in main clauses withtopicalized XPs in Old French (no Somme)
pronoun subject full DP subject
XVS 40 [.98] 146 [.97]
XSV 1 4
pronoun subject full DP subject
XVS 40 [.67] 286 [.78]
XSV 20 81
Topicalized objects
Topicalized PPs
38
pronoun subject full DP subject
XVS 21[.45] 64 [.93]
XSV 26 5
Topicalized Objects
pronoun subject full DP subject
XVS 58[.12] 422 [.61]
XSV 438 274
Topicalized PPs
Frequency of V2 in main clauses withtopicalized XPs in Middle French
39
pronoun subject full DP subject
XVS 21[.45] 64 [.93]
XSV 26 5
Topicalized Objects
pronoun subject full DP subject
XVS 58[.12] 422 [.61]
XSV 438 274
Topicalized PPs
Frequency of V2 in main clauses withtopicalized XPs in Middle French
[.12]
[.45]
39
0
0.06
0.12
0.18
0.24
0.3
0.36
0.42
0.48
0.54
0.6
<1100 1151-1200 1251-1300 1351-1400 1451-1500 1551-1600
Decline of XP fronting in French
Old French Middle French Modern French
direct objects
adverbs and PPs
40
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
1101-1150 1151-1200 1201-1250 1251-1300 1301-1350 1351-1400 1401-1450 1451-1500 1501-1550 1551-1600
Evolution of V2 word order in French
Old French Middle French Modern French
topicalized objects
topicalized adverbsand PPs
Freq
uen
cy V
2
41
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
<1100 1151-1200 1251-1300 1351-1400 1451-1500 1551-1600
Evolution of V2 word order in French in sentences with full DP subjects
Old French Middle French Modern French
topicalized objects
Freq
uen
cy V
2
topicalized adverbsand PPs
42
0
0.09
0.18
0.27
0.36
0.45
0.54
0.63
0.72
0.81
0.9
<1100 1151-1200 1251-1300 1351-1400 1451-1500 1551-1600
Corrected evolution of V2 word order in Frenchin sentences with full DP subjects
Old French Middle French Modern French
topicalized objects
Freq
uen
cy V
2topicalized adverbs
and PPs
43