ABSTRACT

First published in 2003, this is a study of the syntactic behaviour of personal pronoun subjects and the indefinite pronoun man, in Old English. It focuses on differences in word order as compared to full noun phrases. In generative work on Old English, noun phrases have usually divided into two categories: 'nominal' and 'pronominal'. The latter category has typically been restricted to personal pronouns, but despite striking similarities to the behaviour of nominals there has been good reason to believe that man should be grouped with personal pronouns. This book explores investigations carried out in conjunction with the aid of the Toronto Corpus, which confirmed this hypothesis.