The Position of the Adjective in Old English Introduction

The Position of the Adjective in Old English

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   Introduction
   

This study is part of a larger project in which I would like to find out what changes have occurred in the position of the adjective within the noun phrase in the history of English.¹ The questions I would like to see answered are: were there any differences in usage/meaning between pre- and postnominal adjectives in Old English; were these differences in any way tied up with the traditional distinction between strong and weak adjectives; and, finally, were there any radical changes in this area, or is the present-day position of the adjective (which usually occurs before the noun but occasionally also after) a natural and gradual development of its position in Old English involving only minor shifts.

Concerning the last question, opinions seem to differ on this at present. Consider, for instance, Lightfoot (1979: 168 ff.), who writes (when discussing the position of quantifiers in Old English, which in his view are indistinguishable from adjectives at this stage) that Old English adjectives were free to occur prenominally, in pre-determiner position, postnominally and “floating”.² Lightfoot concentrates here on the quantifiers, and the radical change he proposes concerns especially these, but it implies a (radical) change for adjectives too, since it was the fact that adjectives could no longer occur in all of the above-mentioned positions, that caused the quantifiers (which did remain in those positions) to change into a separate category. However, apart from this, Lightfoot notes in a later chapter (1979: 205-208) that the adjectives, too, underwent a change:

OE adjectival modifiers appeared characteristically in prenominal position, particularly for unco-ordinated adjectives and participles. However, in ME postnominal adjectives become increasingly common. In this period most adjectives can occur as pre- and postnominals and the latter appear to represent a productive position, because newly borrowed adjectives are often introduced as postnominals.

Lightfoot believes that this is not due to French influence (as is the common suggestion), first of all, because “in contemporary French adjectives normally occurred prenominally”, but mostly because he “resist[s] such foreign influence interpretations on ideological grounds: such “explanations” … are usually unilluminating” (p. 206). I also do not believe that French played any crucial role in the position of adjectives in Middle English, but it clearly played some role considering the fact that of the postnominal adjectives used in present-day English, many are French, many have become set phrases (see also below).³ In spite of that, Lightfoot’s suggestion that postnominal adjectives became productive and much more frequent in Middle English due to the basic word order change from SOV to SVO, seems to me unlikely too. First of all, Greenberg’s typology, in which SVO order would favour Noun-Adj. order, is based on statistics, and does not necessarily entail a causal relation between SVO and Noun-Adj. Order. More importantly, however, I do not believe that postnominal adjectives did become more productive in Middle English. Of course, in order to be able to compare and to make any factual pronouncements on this, we need to know more about the adjective position in both Old and Middle English.

It is clear from the above that Lightfoot favours a number of radical changes in this area. His view is strongly contrasted with that of some other linguists, such as, for instance, Karl Brunner, who favour a more “gradual” story, a story with little change:

Attributive Adjektive stehen in der ae. Prosa, me. und auch noch heute in der Regel vor dem Substantiv, das sie ergänzen (Attributive adjectives in OE prose, in ME, and also still today, stand as a rule before the noun which they complement) (Brunner 1962: 69, translation mine)

And in what follows, Brunner continues to describe under what circumstances post-position still occurs in Present-day English. First, postposition is used in order to highlight the adjective. Here, he remarks that the Old English postnominal adjective already had this function. Second, it is found when the adjective is accompanied by complements that give extra information about the adjective (as in All the implements necessary for salmon fishing). At this point he does not explicitly refer to Old English, but it will be clear from the discussion below that this is also a common structure in Old English. And, thirdly, postposition occurs with a number of Anglo-French legal expressions such as, heir apparent, princess royal, and a number of “nachgebildete” expressions such as, art military, love eternal etc. In other words, this scenario suggests that there may not have been an awful lot of change between Old and Middle English as far as the adjective position is concerned, apart from a very limited area of fossilized expressions.

Still, most Old English grammar books have a separate section that deals with the special position of the adjective in Old English, in particular when more than one adjective is used (cf. Mossé 1946: 196, Davis 1953: 59, Brook 1955: 82, Quirk and Wrenn 1955: 88-89). The reason given for this variety in word order is usually, given here in the words of G.L. Brook, that “[t]he order of words is less rigid in Old English than in Modern English because the Old English inflectional system, much fuller than that of Modern English, made it possible for a writer to make clear the relation of a word for the rest of the sentence without making use of word order for this purpose” (1955: 82). Although especially Quirk and Wrenn give more details about the kind and number of adjectives that appear postnominally, an explanation for the position itself in syntactic or semantic or in any other terms is not given in any of these grammars.
When I looked into the “Bible” of Old English syntax (Mitchell 1985), I felt satisfied/reassured that indeed there is “room for more work on the arrangements when two attributive adjectives qualify the same noun” (§173). This is what I intend to do in this study, starting with Old English. On the basis of a tagged Old English corpus,⁴ I will try and begin to find out what differences there are in adjective position in Old English and what semantic, pragmatic and/or syntactic factors lie at the basis of these differences. I hope that a closer study into the order of elements within the NP will lead to more insight into the rules that may govern it, just as a more detailed study of Old English clausal word order has proven to be very fruitful, leading to the conclusion that Old English word order is not as free as was for a long time supposed (see above).

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