The Historical Development of the English Anaphora System

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Edward Keenan will conduct one year of linguistic research. The focus of his project is documenting quantitatively a historical change in the logical expressive power of English. In Modern English, the logical meanings of 'The king defended himself' and 'The king defended him' are distinct. In the former, the defender and defendee must be the same. In the latter, they must be different. But Old English (700 - 1150) lacked reflexives, like 'himself'. In Old English, a sentence like 'He defended him' was ambiguous according to whether the defender and defendee were the same person or not. Based on some 11,000 examples drawn from over 100 texts dating from c750 to c1750, this project will document the creation and interpretation of reflexives in English. The data show that reflexives come into being around 1200 and assume their current semantic interpretation rather suddenly in the 1500s. The linguistic interest of the project is twofold. First, this is the first empirically substantiated study of change in logical expressive power of a natural language. The study shows that some logical distinctions that we take for granted in Modern English do not necessarily characterize languages in general. Second, the type of change that this research documents is relatively novel: New forms are created internal to the language rather than borrowed. So this research expands our understanding of how languages may change over time. Finally, this project will contribute to a large database that Dr. Keenan has been building since 1989. The data will be publicly accessible on the web so that other scholars can verify the generalizations produced by this research.