The Syntax of Prenominal and Postnominal Adjectives in Old English

This book is the first monograph which provides a comprehensive discussion of the syntactic behaviour of Old English (OE) adnominal adjectives. Drawing on the empirical data retrieved from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk & Beths 2003), the author proposes an analysis of OE adjectives by means of a theoretical apparatus couched in the framework of Chomsky’s generative grammar. The analysis incorporates the following properties of OE adjectives:

• their inflectional patterning, i.e. whether adjectives take “weak” and “strong” inflectional endings
• the so-called “adjective stacking”, i.e. whether adjectives can occur in uninterrupted strings
• the surface placement with respect to their complements
• the surface placement with respect to the nominal head

The author observes that the differences between prenominal and postnominal adjectives go far beyond the superficial difference in their surface placement. She argues therefore that the two types of adjectives require two different theoretical treatments.

The volume consists of five chapters. It is supplemented by four appendices and an extensive bibliography.