Gary Miller to give LingCircle talk on Gothic and Old English

Gary Miller (Department of Linguistics, University of Florida) will give a talk at the Linguistics Circle on Monday, November 7th, 4:00pm, in Hellems 229. Information about the talk is found below. 

Exceptional Case Marking in Gothic and Old English

In Accusative and Infinitive (AI), the subject of the infinitive gets case from the higher verb but is not one of its arguments. For instance, I believe them to be wise does not entail that I believe them. What is believed is the impression that they are wise. More recently AI has been named Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) because of the so-called ‘exceptional’ assignment of object case to the subject of an infinitive: [I believe [them to be wise]]. Throughout the history of English, ECM has been more felicitous with be and have than with bare eventive verbs. Contrast *I know them to go vs. I know them to be going. Most accounts of the history of ECM in Germanic attribute the construction to borrowing from Greek or Latin. While contact diffusion cannot be discarded entirely, Latin and Greek have AI constructions that are ungrammatical in Gothic and English.

This paper will argue that one source of ECM in Gothic and Old English was the expansion of a Small Clause (SC) by ‘be’. In its simplest form, the SC is a verbless complement clause, like [I consider [them wise]], semantically equivalent to [I consider [them to be wise]]. Proto-Indo-European did not have ECM. In the early IE languages, the SC was the favored complement to factive, epistemic (including pseudo-perception verbs), and declarative predicates. SCs abounded in Old English but could marginally merge with wesan or bēon ‘to be’. In Gothic, SCs could merge with wisan ‘to be’ or wairþan ‘to be(come)’. AI/ECM was not favored in either language, where it was most often translation-prompted. This is not the same as borrowed because only one kind of AI construction was calqued, implying that only that type was grammatical. The rest were rendered in other ways, mostly by means of a finite (‘that’) clause. The similarities between Gothic and Old English are too precise to be coincidental.