“The Positioning of Adverbial Clauses in the Paston Letters”

From ICEHL 17 (Zürich, August 2012)

This paper is a contribution to Meaning in the History of English: Words and Texts in Context, which is a volume of proceedings of the 17th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, University of Zürich, August 2012.

Adverbial clauses and their position in sentences

While there are a number of studies on the positioning of adverbial clauses in sentences in contemporary English, those discussing the same issue in the history of English are not numerous. This paper discusses the ordering of some adverbial clauses (if, though (although), when, because (be cause), till (until)) and the main clause in the Paston Letters in Middle English. It considers various factors such as information structure, the length of adverbial clauses, and also deals with subordinate clauses within subordinate clauses, highlighting mainly the continuity between Middle and Modern English.

Related publications

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2006. “The Development of Non-assertive any in The Paston Letters“, in Textual and Contextual Studies in Medieval English: Towards the Reunion of Linguistics and Philology, ed. Michiko Ogura, pp. 19-33. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2007. ”Decline of Some Middle English Features of Negation in the Fifteenth Century: A Study of The Paston Letters“, in Language and Beyond: A Festschrift for Hiroshi Yonekuraon the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Mayumi Sawada, Larry Walker, & Shizuya Tara, pp. 249-63. Tokyo: Eichosha.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2013. “The Verb pray in Chaucer and Caxton”, in Approaching Language Variation through Corpora: A Festschrift in Honour of Toshio Saito, ed. Shunji Yamazaki & Robert Sigley, pp. 289-306. Bern: Peter Lang.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2022. “From Tho to Those in Fifteenth-Century English”, in Variational Studies on Pronominal Forms in the History of English, ed. Yoko, Iyeiri, Jeremy Smith, Hiroshi Yadomi & David Selfe, pp. 21-35. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.