The Old English double object alternation : a discourse-based approach

This article examines the double object alternation in Old English (OE), the historical precursor to the dative alternation in contemporary English (John gives Mary a book vs. John gives a book to Mary). The dative alternation is well studied in present day English (PDE), but in OE it has received much less attention. The goal of this article is to determine the motivating factors behind the double object alternation in OE. Various studies indicate that the dative alternation in PDE is largely motivated by discourse-semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors (animacy, pronominality, specificity, identifiability, proper-nounhood and givenness) as well as heaviness (longer objects tend to follow shorter ones). It seems reasonable to suppose that the same discourse factors that drive the dative alternation in PDE also account for the OE double object alternation. This hypothesis was tested by means of a corpus study of 550 OE sentences. The results indicate that only a limited number of factors accounting for the dative alternation in PDE also influence the OE double object order. Only the factors pronominality, specificity and givenness are found to correlate significantly with the use of one of both object orders. It is concluded that other factors will also have to be taken into consideration to give a full account of the OE object alternation, in particular stylistic and lexical factors.

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