Against the Evolutionary Approach to Old English Relative Clauses

The evolutionary accounts of relative clauses assume that the history of English has witnessed the diachronic development of relative clauses from extraposed to subordinated structure via the intermediate stage of left dislocation. The evolutionary approach, however, faces some serious empirical and conceptual issues. First of all, its idea of unidirectional development fails to be compatible with the historical fact that all those three types already existed in the earliest extant texts of Old English. Postulation of distinct developmental stages and transition between them are also greatly undermined by structural ambiguity, Case attraction and Case mismatch. As an alternative, this study proposes functional and textual accounts to illuminate the coexistence and the fluctuation of the three types of Old English relative clauses. Relative clauses both in the right and left periphery of the main clause result from information packaging processes such as extraposition, right dislocation and left dislocation, all of which involve the way the contents of information are delivered and cause the distortion of word order. The frequency variation between the relative clause types is attributed to textual properties. Statistics from Old English texts testify that irrespective of the time of writing, religious texts reveal a much higher frequency of extraposition and left dislocation than secular texts. The distributional asymmetry between them is due to the fact that religious texts including homilies often adopted information packaging constructions for the effective delivery of religious message while nonreligious texts tended to concentrate on the contents themselves.