A native origin for Present-Day English they, their, them

被引:11
|
作者
Cole, Marcelle [1 ]
机构
[1] Univ Utrecht, Dept Languages Literature & Commun, NL-3512 JK Utrecht, Netherlands
关键词
Old Northumbrian; Old English; Old Norse; Northern Middle English; personal pronoun; demonstrative; Lindisfarne Gospels gloss; LAEME; OLD-ENGLISH;
D O I
10.1075/dia.16026.col
中图分类号
H0 [语言学];
学科分类号
030303 ; 0501 ; 050102 ;
摘要
It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns peir, peira, peim. This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the 'p-' type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives pa, para, pam. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.
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页码:165 / 209
页数:45
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