Argument structure and genitive modification in the Old English noun phrase

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As the Old English hero Beowulf dies, his soul departs his body and seeks the sofæstra dom, the "judgement of the righteous". Literary criticism debates the relationship between the head noun (or possessum), dom "judgement", and the dependent genitive (or possessor), sofæstra "righteous people"; are the righteous those doing the judging, and Beowulf is damned, or does his soul seek out the judgement afforded to the righteous? The possessor can be the agent of the action expressed by the possessum (doing the judging) or the patient (being judged). The project proposed seeks to address adnominal genitive modification of the type seen in the example sofæstra dom from a formal linguistic perspective. It will focus on examples of possessors marked by genitive case modifying possessum nouns which have at least one thematic role, such as agent or patient, attached to it, or, in more formal terms, which have argument structure (a-structure). In Presentday English, this includes "John's love for Mary", and "John's assassination". The project is not concerned with phrases of possession like cyninges mearh "king's horse", since "horse" is not a noun with a-structure. Under investigation is how the possessors associated with thematic roles of nouns with argument structure function in terms of grammatical relations. For a verbal phrase, like "the righteous judge Beowulf", identifying subject and object is straightforward, but the same easy identification does not hold in the noun phrase. One possibility is that nouns with argument structure (hereafter A-nouns) have the same a-structure as related verbs; a noun like dom therefore subcategorizes for subject and object grammatical functions in the same way that the verb deman "to judge" does. A-nouns may be thought of as having nominal- specific grammatical functions like POSS, as is used for core possessors like "king" in "king's horse". It is one goal to determine how best these possessor participants of A-nouns can best be treated syntactically.My study will use corpus methodology, as is usual in current historical linguistics. I propose to chiefly use the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE, see http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/YCOE/YcoeHome.htm), which is a 1.5 million word syntactically-annotated corpus. A mixed methodology is proposed for the data collection; samples of 1,000 words of all texts in the corpus will be searched electronically for possessor/possessum structures using the annotation. Relevant A-nouns can be extracted from these search results and will then themselves be searched for across the entire YCOE. In addition, these A-nouns can also be searched for in the poetic texts not included in the YCOE by using the Dictionary of Old English corpus, which is not parsed. Using this mix of data collection methods, a database will be created of instances of all selected A-nouns with adnominal possessors. Each example in the database will be tagged for linguistic features including the thematic role or probable roles of the adnominal possessor, the presence of any deverbal morphology on the head noun, the animacy of the two NPs, and the valency and a-structure patterns of related verbs in Old English. This database will then be used to produce some basic statistical analysis on the relative significance of the various features identified. This database can be made available online, in the interests of reproducibility and open access. The project will make an empirically validated claim about the syntactic status of A-nouns at an early period in English. The proposed research will make a theoretical, empirical and diachronic contribution to the study of the noun phrase and argument structure, possession in English, and to study of the syntax of Old English. The research speaks to whether there is such a thing as variation in natural language, and to whether linguistic vagueness is a reality.