The Position of the Adjective in Old English Introduction

4. A brief conclusion
Although more extensive work is clearly necessary, both on Old and especially on Middle English data, a few tendencies have come to the fore. It seems indeed that there is a relation between the position of the adjective and the feature of (in)definiteness in Old English: weak adjectives are related, as Brunner and others already suggested, with definiteness , and as “given” information they tend to occur before the noun. Strong adjectives are predicative rather than attributive in nature, which makes it difficult for them to occur in a series, hierarchically. They are associated with indefiniteness and with “new” information. For this reason a still frequent position is the postnominal one. With the rise of a new determiner system and the loss of the strong/weak distinction, the two types of adjectives may have lost some of their distinctive features, with the result that they came to be used more or less indiscriminately prenominally (with some relic postnominal positions left over), but how exactly their position was affected in the period immediately following the Old English period, is a topic for further study.


Notes

1 I would like to thank Willem Koopman and Bettelou Los for their careful reading of a second version of this paper and for their useful suggestions and comments.

2 Not everyone agrees with this idea, i.e. that quantifiers were part of the category Adjective in Old English. Although it is true that adjectives could occur in all the positions quantifiers occurred in, there were severe restrictions for adjectives, both as to type of adjective as well as to textual genre (poetry vs. prose). For more details see Bennett (1979), and Fischer and van der Leek (1981: 311-337). For some further differences between adjectives and quantifiers see also notes 8 and 9 below. Note also that in other languages, such as modern Italian, where adjectives can take up more than one position, that there too the quantifiers behave differently from the adjectives. For this reason Vincent (1986: 187) does not include them in his discussion of the position of adjectives.

3 Lightfoot (1979: 206-9) illustrates, by means of a study based on a small corpus of Chaucerian texts, how productive postnominals are with native Germanic words. I believe that these examples need to be carefully looked at before any suggestion can be made that this postnominal position became more productive in Middle English. It seems to me that many of the examples he gives are examples of predicatively used adjectives (below we will see that these are typically postnominal in Old English) and his illustrations on p. 208 make clear that he also includes examples involving more than one adjective, where postnominal position of one or two adjectives was very common in Old English. Moreover most of his examples come from poetic texts, and it seems highly likely that postnominal position may well be more frequent there than in prose, as it was in Old English and as it still is in modern English poetry.

4 The corpus I have used is the prose part of the Old English part of the Helsinki corpus (the glosses excepted), which is momentarily being tagged at the Free University of Amsterdam. I would like to thank Frank Beths, who is the main “tagger”, for his expert and freely given help in my use of it. The tags used in this text refer to the tags used in the Helsinki Corpus (for which see Kytö 1991), but some abbreviations have been enlarged for easier reference. Some further examples come from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus.

5 I would like to thank Nigel Vincent for drawing my attention to this article during the presentation of this paper in Manchester.

6 In a forthcoming paper (Fischer 1999) I will discuss why the more pronounced marking of strong adjectival endings, compared to weak ones, is significant from a functional point of view.

7 He argues that strong adjectives were determiners, and that weak adjectives were “adjuncts”, and that with the loss of inflectional endings these adjectives fell together, as a result of which the initial demonstrative, which was originally adjectival, became realised as the definite article. His solution for the rise of the article is very simple and elegant, but it may not quite work, since, as I will show below, the distinction between adjective/determiners and adjective/adjuncts does not cover all the facts of Old English. It should also be noted that Spamer’s use of the term “adjunct” is rather idiosyncratic, and is not really described clearly in his article. As far as I could make out from his description (“The chief defining characteristic of the adjunct is that it behaves in many respects as if it were the first part of a compound noun”, p. 242), he uses the term to refer to what Quirk and Greenbaum have called a “denominal adjective”.

8 Mitchell does give some examples (e.g. in §145, ealne þisne middangeard) but they are rare, and, when they do occur together, the quantifier, if it follows the determiner, is indeed a weak adjective (whereas normally quantifiers are strong): e.g. þa monigan cyningas, þas feawan dagas.
⁹ This is another indication that shows that the quantifiers in Old English did not quite behave like adjectives as was suggested by Lightfoot 1979 (cf. Section 1 above).
¹⁰ Bettelou Los suggested (p.c.) that the absence of such constructions may not have a syntactic cause, that in fact such constructions may be rare in Present-day English too, or that, when they occur in Present-day English, they are the result of the development of a literary style. It would be difficult to prove the influence of style. However, I have consulted the recent newspaper-corpus collected by a colleague, Tom van Brederode, which is about the same size as the Old English corpus I have used here (4,682,625 words as against the Old English Corpus of 5,894,365 words). I have found 100 occurrences of phrases with the determiner the and very followed by an adjective and a noun (e.g. the very intelligent suggestion, the very limited powers, the very strong-willed attitudes). I have not checked any other forms of determiner nor any other adverbs, but this at least suggests that the construction is quite common in present-day English. I have also briefly checked the website of the Middle English Dictionary (Middle English Compendium http://www.hti.umich.edu/mec/) and found that these constructions only begin to occur in the 15^th century; only constructions such as the moste+Adj.+Noun are somewhat earlier, e.g. I found þe most kyd kny3tes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the moste reale place in The Allitterative Morte Arthur. But again these too only become common in the fifteenth century.
¹¹ The adjectives in –weard are a special case, in the sense that they are the only adjectives which, at least in prose, regularly occur prenominally (i), postnominally (ii), and even before the determiner (iii). When they are postnominal they can often be interpreted adverbially as in (iib); the dictionaries even give the –um ending as an adverbial ending (this case could be similar to the one mentioned below: i.e. the ‘adverbial’ status of miclan and also miclum). The fact that they can also be used as particles no doubt accounts for their “adverbial” usage. It is also quite clear from the examples given below that the meaning of the adjective depends quite crucially on position in these cases. Thus inneweard usually means ‘on the inside’ postnominally, but ‘sincere’ prenominally as in (ia). Likewise toweard used postnominally expresses that the event lies in the future (see iia), whereas prenominally it refers to a kind of future life, i.e. the Christian heaven.

(i)a we hine biddað mid inneweardre heortan (ÆHom l.39)

we him pray with (a) sincere heart
b þæt he ne þurfe þrowian on ðam toweardan life (ÆHom l.157)
so-that he not need suffer in the future life
(ii)a and him sige towardne geheht (BlHom5 l.95) (towardne is acc. sg. str., hence adjectival)
and him victory impending promised
b se leoma gehran þæm treowum ufonweardum (Alex. l.849)
the light touched the trees highest/above (here ufonweardum can be both adj. and adv.)

3. 
   and þa heafda ealle wurdon gesette on ufeweardum þam geate (Apol. Tyre l.6.1)
   

and the heads all were placed on above the gate /on top of the gate