Book Description

The nature of imperative syntax has remained an elusive, yet ever-present, subject in syntactic research, spanning several decades of linguistic inquiry and analysis, and it is therefore unsurprising that current views on the subject continue to be somewhat divided. This thesis examines the syntactic evidence from imperatives in Old English and ultimately seeks to develop a picture of the possibilities for imperative clauses in OE alongside an overall framework for imperative syntax within contemporary theoretical models of syntactic structure. The general, perceived pattern for OE imperative clauses (e.g. Millward 1971) is & ldquo;verb & minus;first, & rdquo; and statistical data from the corpora confirm this perception, with the majority of imperative clauses exhibiting the verb in clause & minus;initial position. Imperative constructions with post & minus; and preverbal overt subjects are also examined at length, and postverbal subjects are found to be the majority case. These results are further expanded by examinations of data from verb & minus;second and verb & minus;third contexts, which include possibilities for topicalized constituents and adverbs. Ultimately, the relative position of both the verb and the subject and the relationship between these and other elements in the totality of the data provide essential clues for constructing a clearer model of OE imperative syntax. Within a relatively rich cartographic framework (Rizzi 1997), I therefore argue that the imperative verb is standardly fronted to the head of ForceP, with the overt subject remaining in spec & minus;FinP, in parallel with other models for imperative syntax and OE syntax. Exceptions to this pattern for imperatives which suggest lower positions for the imperative verb (e.g. verb & minus;second and verb & minus;third constructions) are also accounted for, all with the central goal of demonstrating a consistent pattern underlying the realization of imperative syntax in Old English.