The Influence of Language Contact on the
English Personal Pronouns

von: Gesa Giesing

CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION 3

1.1 HOW THE BANANA DIFFERS FROM PERSONAL PRONOUNS 3
1.2 THE USE OF STELLA 4
1.3 LIMITS OF THE HELSINKI CORPUS 4

2 MAIN BODY 5

2.1 THE OLD ENGLISH PERSONAL PRONOUN PARADIGM 5
2.2 THE SCANDINAVIAN INFLUENCE 6

2.2.1 Some Historical Notes 6
2.2.2 Some Linguistic Notes 6
2.2.3 The Third Person Plural Pronouns 7
2.2.4 A Remark on Parallel Developments 9

2.3 THE FRENCH INFLUENCE 10

2.3.1 Some Historical Notes 10
2.3.2 Some Linguistic Notes 10
2.3.3 The Second Person Pronouns 11

2.3.3.1 Changes Induced by French Contact 11
2.3.3.2 Other Changes 12

3 CONCLUSION- SUMMARY, DEFICIENCIES, PROSPECT 13

4 PRINTED WORKS CONSULTED AND CITED 14
 

1 Introduction

1.1 How the Banana Differs from Personal Pronouns

When the banana was first introduced to the British Isles nobody knew what to call this new long, yellow object. The easiest way to make up for the want of a concise expression was to borrow the word from the languages spoken in the banana’s countries of origin, i.e. Spanish and Portuguese. In 1597 Hartwell remarked: ”Other fruits there are, termed Banana, which we verily think to be the Muses of Egypt and Soria.” (OED). Extra - linguistic circumstances had led to change, here addition, in a language’s lexical s ystem.

But the process of change is not always as straightforward as here. First of all, obviously not only the lexicon is subject to change, but likewise are the phonological, the semantic and other systems of a language. Secondly, also intra-linguistic modifications, however triggered, can result in further adjustments within other areas of the language. Thirdly, addition is certainly not the only possible change. Replacement, loss and shift are some other phenomena that might succeed both extra- and intra-linguistic developments. One could add that, for instance in the case of addition, it is not always clear whether the need for a new word or the new word, having been used synonymously with some other expression in the beginning, occurred first. But the main confusion definitely arises from the interdependence of all movements within language and beyond. Linguistic change is usually far more complex than was the case with the banana. But, as Smith (1996: 43) has pointed out, there are three main factors with the help of which linguistic change can be understood and described, namely contact , variation and systemic regulation. So contact between different varieties or languages may add elements that are not necessary, i.e. two or more elements are used in variation until the system adjusts itself in order to improve its efficiency. I am not going to discuss in detail these three mechanisms underlying most processes of change and the various ways they might be interwoven. Rather, this paper will investigate how personal pronouns as an example were affected by them in the ME period, an instance where change was all but straightforward. The focus will be on language contact. An attempt will be made to give answers to the following questions:

* How do the developments of the second and the third person pronoun respectively differ from the ‘normal’ change of words from OE to PDE?
* Which role does the contact with France and Scandinavia play?

This is to show that the two contact situations had a fairly different impact on English pronouns, where Scandinavian influence is far more fundamental, eventuating in morphological1 changes as opposed to the pragmatic changes connected with French contact. This difference is paralleled by changes in other areas of the language and gives us some idea of the way the newcomers integrated with the Anglo-Saxons. After a short overview of the historic events leading to Scandinavian and French contact, the nature of the change in the pronominal system will be outlined and evidence will be given by textual references of the ME period.

1.2 The Use of STELLA

STELLA, acronym for Software for Teaching English and Scottish Language and Literature, is a software package Glasgow University provides for their students to assist both in-class and individual work in English and Scottish studies.2 This essay makes use of two components of the package. With the help of the electronic Oxford English Dictionary all spellings of the words examined were found . Whereas for this purpose it would have been possible to use the printed edition of the OED the results provided by the Helsinki Corpus could not have been achieved without electronic means. The diachronic part of the HC, which is the part employed for this essay, is an electronic collection of early English texts. It encompasses extracts of long works, such as the Canterbury Tales, as well as complete shorter texts, such as letters. The database is divided into three main sections, namely Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English, where the texts for the latter are taken from the South of Britain. The rough year boundaries and sub-periods assigned by the compilers to the periods of OE and ME are the following:

Old English: OE1(- 850), OE2 (850- 950), OE3 (950- 1050), OE4 (1050- 1150)
Middle English: Early Middle English : EM1 (1150- 1250), EM2 (1250- 1350)
Late Middle English: EM3 (1350- 1420), EM4 (1420- 1500)

Within each main section searches for words can be made with respect to certain parameters that have been assigned to each text and are now to be selected by the user. So users can not only have a look at all occurrences of one or more word(s) but may restrict their search to a certain sub-period, certain kinds of texts, certain authors or dialects, etc. The results can be viewed in different ways, such as the complete chosen text(s) with the word(s) searched for ‘simply’ highlighted, or as a list of lines or paragraphs containing the relevant word(s). The user can also chose from a range of options as to which information is given with each passage. For the sources of the texts, instructions how to run the programme and other details refer to the manual by Kytö (1996) listed in chapter 4.

1.3 Limits of the Helsinki Corpus

[...]

1 I consider here pronouns to be part of the morphology, knowing that they are as well syntactical and lexical items.

2 More information can be found on the following web page: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/STELLA