Diachrony of Inflected Possessives in Old English Poetry

Textual investigation of Old English poetry indicates that the dislocation and the metrical prominence of the inflected possessive fluctuate, depending on the probable date of composition. Compared with the Alfredian and later poems, the earlier ones exhibit overwhelmingly higher frequency of dislocation among the tokens of the inflected possessive. The severe asymmetry between them is also confirmed in the fact that only the earlier poems show the relatively high ratio of the stressed tokens among the in-situ inflected possessive. Given that both dislocation and rhythmic stress are generally associated with a lexical category of the adjective in Old English poetry, diachrony in the inflected possessive testifies that it already began to undergo the loss of adjectivehood and the categorial shift into the determiner, prior to the formal demise of its adjectival inflectional paradigms. Furthermore, textual evidence on those two properties of the inflected possessive can help decide the relative chronology between Old English poems, in that they represent archaisms and are much more likely to appear in earlier poems.