Adjective position in Old English from a micro-level perspective

Abstract The Old English noun phrase displays more variation in word order than its Present-day English equivalent. This study aims to investigate the internal word order of Old English noun phrases, with a view to identify the factors which determines the placement of adjectives. The data for this study is obtained by annotating 400 noun phrases from three texts: the West-Saxon Gospels, the Leechbook and the Peterborough Chronicle. The texts are taken from the YCOE corpus, and the noun phrases to be investigated are stored in a database, NPEGL (Noun Phrases in Early Germanic Languages), which is being created for the project Constraints on syntactic variation: noun phrases in early Germanic languages. The position of the adjectives in the annotated phrases is analysed in relation to previous research, and theories of adjective placement, particularly those of Fischer (2000, 2001, 2006, 2010), Haumann (2003, 2010), Grabski (2017) and Bech (2017, 2019). There are differing views concerning the distribution of adjectives, and some of the accounts show opposing views, as in the case of Fischer (2000, 2001, 2006, 2010) and Haumann (2003, 2010). The analysis of adjective position in the annotated phrases thus centers on properties in their schemes, as these are often used in the investigation of OE adjective placement. The study shows that there is variation in the distribution of noun phrases in the three texts. There are more modifiers in the Leecbook, which is ascribed to the need for more detailed descriptions in a medical text. The occurrence of postnominal modifiers is significantly lower than that of prenominal modifiers, and most of the postnominal modifiers occur in the Leechbook. All texts have occurrences of stacked adjectives, which show that adjectives are recursive in Old English, although this is disputed by some scholars. The analysis show that the findings do not consistently corroborate Fischer’s (2000, 2001, 2006, 2010) and Haumann’s (2003, 2010) schemes