# Summary of: Subject Properties in Early Modern Germanic Languages (2025)

Pierre-Yves Modicom

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Pierre-Yves Modicom. Summary of: Subject Properties in Early Modern Germanic Languages (2025). 2025. hal-05041146

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Summary of

# Subject Properties in Early Modern Germanic Languages

## A Contrastive Corpus-Based Study

(De Gruyter, 2025)

Pierre-Yves Modicom

## 1. Aim of the monograph

The definition of what should be called a subject and which criteria should be used to identify and compare subjects across languages is a significant issue in typological linguistics, at least since Keenan (1976) and Li & Thompson (1976). While many central questions were first raised for non-Indo-European languages, things are not necessarily much clearer in present-day Germanic languages. Information-structural or semantico-pragmatic approaches, sometimes inspired by Strawson (1971), have insisted on the central role of topicality as a subject feature (see Chafe 1976). This has led to much fine-grained work on the opposition between subject-prominent and topic-prominent languages, an opposition which should not be understood as discrete (Li & Thompson 1976). A series of subject properties appear to depend on text-structuring mechanisms, anaphora and information structure (Lazard 1994). Accounts centered on the structure of the verb phrase are more concerned with syntax and valency, discussing issues of system-wide alignment (and “configurationality”), of verb-specific alternations, and to some extent of frame semantics, too. Recent research on this matter includes work on Germanic languages such as German and Icelandic. Some scholars have even proposed to drop the notion of subject as a uniform cross-linguistic category (Croft 2000), or to work on two notions of subjecthood, informational and argumental (see Lazard 1994 and 2012 on his notion of “subject configuration”). To this day, the older typological works by Lazard have hardly been received in Germanic linguistics, but they echo more recent advances on non-canonical case-marking (starting from Barðdal 2002 and subsequent). The monograph is intended as an implementation of Lazard’s proposal on Germanic, albeit within a stricter Construction Grammar perspective as the original. The “subject configuration” is reinterpreted as a combination of constructional features that can be split into two main form-function pairings: informational subjecthood and argumental subjecthood (see below section 3, summary of chapter 1). The study explores the spectrum of constructional characteristics of each concept of subjecthood in four Germanic languages as well as their various degrees of respective autonomy, from quasi-independence (High German) to the nearly total entrenchment of informational subjecthood within argumental subjecthood (English).

Above all, the specificity of the present volume is that it does not focus on present-day systems, for which the body of data and theories at hand is already considerable, but on data from the late 16th century. The study takes a mostly synchronic point of view, using a parallel corpus made up of the 1587 edition of the Faust-Volksbuch and its first translations in Danish (1588), English (ca. 1588), and Dutch (1592). The reason for this is twofold. First, late 16th-century Early Modern English is the last stage in the evolution of English before the generalization of *do*-periphrases as we know them today. Now, *do*-periphrases depend on the subject-predicate dichotomy and are representative of a very high degree of configurationality of subject-object asymmetry. Early Modern English is thus the latest stage of English where the issue of configurationality is less clear-cut than today. Likewise, Burridge (1993) has showed that the 16th century is one of the latest transitional stages in the rise of configurationality in Dutch. Furthermore, the 16th century is an important period of *Ausbau* and reconfiguration of the discourse traditions in vernacular Germanic languages. One of the most significant differences with present-day
varieties is the major role played by so-called “periodic syntax”, a writing code making significant use of clitic dislocation, correlation and binary structures as text-organizing strategies, jeopardizing the very borders of the utterance (Siouffi 2019, Lefèvre 2017, Rinas 2019 a.o.). And indeed, the corpus investigation shows significant differences in the encoding of topical properties and of anaphoric mechanisms that are crucial for the subject tests directed at informational properties of subjects. Thus, focusing on Early Modern Germanic enables is to bridge the gap between linguistic typology and discourse-organization and text linguistics. These matters are discussed extensively in chapter 2, which is devoted to justifying the choice of the corpus.

The Faust-Volksbuch is a relevant set of data, because it mixes strictly narrative chapters and lengthy descriptions of cities, encyclopedic digressions on the natural sciences, as well as extensive theological disputes between Faustus and the devil Mephostophiles (sic). All these chapters had been compiled and expanded from heterogeneous material. Thus, the question of genre-specific writing bias and idolcts can be examined in a philologically solid fashion, especially considering the existence of an alternative compilation by another anonymous writer (the *Wolfenbütteler Fassung*). This is a highly interesting feature, given the fact that the monograph questions the sensitivity of subjecthood tests to text-organization habits.

The inclusion of the first Danish, Dutch and English translations makes the study of these three languages sensitive to idiolectal biases, but still, it is also the opportunity to embed the study within a broader, cross-Germanic framework that further connects the analysis to typological discussions. Dutch and High German are closely related historically and typologically. But the downfall of case and subject-verb agreement sets Dutch apart regarding the coding properties of subjects. English has lost the distinctive typological properties of the branch and has developed a strict subject-verb cluster. Case has all but disappeared, subject-verb agreement is very limited, and word-order rules are very different from what they are in other West Germanic systems. Finally, Danish has also undergone an almost complete loss of case and subject-verb agreement, while preserving Scandinavian word-order rules.

## 2. Findings

Using a shared set of comparative concepts for the various constructional layers of the subject configuration, the study offers a detailed description of each of the four language-specific subject configurations in the Early Modern stage. Building on previous historical insights about each of the layers, it also paves the way to a cross-Germanic, panchronic two-dimensional spectrum of subject properties, situating each language stage in the evolution of informational and argumental subjecthood, and showing how the evolution of the two dimensions becomes correlated once a critical degree of “dissociation” is reached.

From a more general point of view, the study leads to a revision of the classical set of subject properties listed since Keenan (1976) into three relatively homogeneous layers of constructional features: (i) informational features (positional properties in V2 languages, anaphoric properties, deletion under coordination...), (ii) cross-lexical, frame-specific argumental constructions (including case-assignment in Early Modern Dutch and Early Modern Danish); (iii) lexical idiosyncrasies related to ontological features of the verb and its arguments (in High Early German, this appears to be the level where the selection of the nominative case is licensed). The most striking parameter of variation is the level of entrenchment of the nominative case, which varies from one language to the other. Argumental subjecthood itself appears to be a complex set of constructional properties from groups (ii) and (iii). The combination of these three constructional layers involve interfaces and the possibility of conflicts. The various forms and degrees of the “external nominative subject” constraint and of agreement rules in Germanic are examples of such mismatches at the interfaces.
Informational subjecthood plays a consistent role in the syntax of Germanic languages, but two modes have to be distinguished: Early New High German is submitted to very strong influence of discourse cohesion, which especially observable on anaphoric mechanisms. The situation is maximally different in Early Modern English. Even before the rise of *do*-anaphors, informational subjecthood was an internal parameter entrenched within argumental subjecthood in Early Modern English. This entrenchment of informational subjecthood within argumental subjecthood is much less salient in Early Modern Danish and above all in Early Modern Dutch.

The study also confirms that Keenan's (1976) core coding properties that end up being associated with argumental subjecthood were construction-dependent in all four languages at the time, although the degree of dependency on individual frames varies from one language to the other, with Early New High German displaying the highest degree of variation, followed by Early Modern Danish. Within the set of argumental subjecthood, two groups of properties have to be distinguished. The first associates nominative case-marking and Keenan's "semantic properties of subjects" insofar as they pertain to the ontology of subject arguments. The other group corresponds to argumental frames and the ontology of processes, including some of the selectional restrictions listed by Keenan as subject properties. The notion of agency is relevant at both levels, hence a series of potential mismatches whose fine-grained semantic dimensions can curb case-assignment.

### 3. Chapter-by-chapter summary

Chapter 1 ("Introduction: the trouble with subjects") deals with the problem of subjecthood as a cross-linguistic and language-specific category and presents the issues and questions underlying the book. It starts with a brief presentation and justification of the approach in the monograph, which is inspired by Lazard's multi-dimensional model of subjecthood. This approach is illustrated with well-established data from a plurality of Germanic languages (High German, Icelandic, Dutch, Danish). The observations corroborate the central claim of the monograph, namely that Germanic subjecthood consists of two main modules whose combination and respective autonomy is both language- and construction-dependent: argumental and informational subjecthood. Each subject construction corresponds to a combination of both modules; but it also appears that the default configuration of each module is the result of a combination of features. The most important parameter of variation regarding informational subjecthood is the degree of syntacticization of aboutness topics, and the degree of conflation of topicality and subjecthood. The heterogeneity of argumental subjecthood can be explored following Keenan's, Lazard's and Barðdal's criteria. A crucial matter is "dissociation", a gradual process by which argumental subjecthood becomes autonomous from valency, thus licensing the emergence of semantically empty subjects, the prohibition of impersonal passives and the resorption of oblique subjects, three grammatical phenomena which therefore play a major role in the study.

Chapter 2 ("Rhetorical constraints on clause syntax") is a presentation of the corpus, followed by a description of the most salient linguistic features of the four languages considered here in the late 16th century. An important point is that the texts were written shortly before major changes in writing practices throughout learned Europe. Texts from the 1580s and 1590s are still representative of the periodic writing style influenced by the Latin rhetorical paradigm of *copia* (abundance); most crucially for us, the fact that the rhetorical period is the unit of reference of narrative prose has major syntactic implications on word order, ellipsis and anaphora, an interesting examples of how writing codes can jeopardize traditional grammatical tests (here: subject ellipsis).

Chapter 3 ("Informational subjecthood and topicality") is a description of subject syntax at the level of discourse structure as well as clause-level information structure. The first section is devoted to
ellipsis mechanisms and other transphrastic features such as consecutive inversion (or consecutive V1), a phenomenon that has all but disappeared from present-day Germanic languages other than Yiddish, but was still very vivid in High German at the time. The second section of this chapter deals with information-structurally marked constructions at the beginning of the utterance: dislocation and correlative constructions, as well as topic change constructions (which license verb-third in Early New High German as in the present-day standard variety, but not in the other languages of the corpus). Once more, High German shows more flexibility than the other three languages, but only English is set apart by major differences, which are investigated separately.

**Chapter 4 ("Dissociation at the interface of informational and argumental structure")** is devoted to several related issues at the interface between argumental and informational subjecthood: the use of so-called formal subjects, the existence of one or several expletives (or the lack thereof), and the possibility of subjectless clauses that do not fall under the label of discourse-motivated ellipsis as discussed in chapter 3. First, I expose the limits of the notion of formal subjects in all four languages due to the fuzzy borders between so-called formal subjects and ana- and, above all, cataphoric subject pronouns, at least when we leave the realm of meteorological verbs. I then turn to expletives, which I define as positional fillers (mostly) specialised for the first position in the clause (Early New High German *es*, Early Modern Dutch *dær* / =er, Early Modern Danish *der*, and at least to some extent Early Modern English *there*). Two contexts of use have to be examined apart from all others: existential and presentative constructions, which are theoretically redefined in consideration of the corpus data. (1) is an existential and (2) a presentative construction. For the sake of illustration, I provide the Danish translation of each, which systematically involves the alleged "expletive" *der*, including in post-verbal position, which makes it more than a mere positional filler (I argue that at this stage, it has grammaticalized into a marker of theticity obligatory in clauses with a rhematic subject).

(1) In der Stadt hat es 68 Mürläder
In the city have es 68 mills

"In the city, there are 68 mills." (Faustus DE, chap. 26, p. 66)

(1b) Udi staden er *der* 68 Mølhiul
Inside city.DEF be.IND.PRS DER 68 mills

"In the city, there are 68 mills." (Faustus DK, chap. 26, p. 94)

(2) Es giengen aber erstlich hineyn sieben fürnemme Geister
ES entered but firstly PVB seven noble spirits

"But firstly, there appeared seven noble spirits." (Faustus DE chap. 23, p. 50)

*Der* ginge dog først siu af de fornemeste Aander frem
DER entered but first seven of ART noble.SUPERL spirits PVB

"But firstly, there appeared seven noble spirits." (Faustus DK chap. 23, p. 68-69)

These constructions involve fillers in all languages, with specific restrictions in English. The study of presentative constructions in English reveals the existence of optional subject agreement in the translator's idiolect, a pattern which had never been signaled before in English, but is attested in similar contexts in other Germanic languages (e.g. in Yiddish). In Dutch and Danish, an expletive of locative origin is systematically used (*dær* and *der*), with interesting signs of further developments to non-
expletive uses as “formal subject” used in existential contexts. The other crucial context, including for the
use for expletives, is the passive voice. High German and Dutch are showed to allow proper subjectless
passives, which is not the case of English and Danish – whereas Present-Day Danish can build subjectless
passive clauses with a formal subject. The situation of Danish is taken under special scrutiny: like all
Mainland Scandinavian languages, two passive constructions (one of them a medio-passive) alternate in
discourse. Deponent verbs are built using the “morphological passive” (originally a medio-passive, which
retains some of its non-oppositional “deponent” uses). The argumental frames of these deponent verbs
(e.g. *siunes*, “think”, *begyndes*, “start to be the case”, *førsvandes* “disappear”...) are various and marked by
semantically-motivated case alternations. This hints at a certain degree of autonomy for case-assignment
mechanisms within the set of argumental subject properties.

The fifth and last chapter ("Oblique subjects and argumental subjecthood") addresses the specific issue of non-nominative subjects in all four languages. The English translation is dealt with separately at the end of the chapter, due to its numerous idiosyncrasies such as the presence of remnant oblique subject constructions for lexical verbs denoting processes other than internal states. The comparative part of the chapter is divided into three sections. First, I review verbs of internal states, classified on an onomasiological base (verbs of thirst and hunger; of dreaming; of volition). It appears that High German uses both dative and accusative subjects, whereas Dutch and Danish generally add either a "formal" or a cataphoric neutral subject taking over some subject properties from the oblique experiencer. The detailed conditions for this involvement of secondary formal subjects are discussed on the basis of corpus data. Second, I cross-examine the various constructions of the cognates of *think*, which exhibit oblique subject constructions in all four languages. All the verbs at stake allow several case-assignment patterns, corresponding to different semantic features and different argumental frames. Third, I concentrate on the uses of the BE with a dative experiencer subject in High German, and their various translations in Dutch, Danish and English. In general, oblique subject constructions are relics of older language stages in all four languages, although these constructions are much more vivid in High German than in the other three languages. The alternation between several case-assignment patterns is regulated by semantic factors pertaining to *Aktionsart* and to process elaboration (typically and somewhat unsurprisingly, control of the action). These regularities are similar to those observed for voice alternation in Mainland Scandinavian. In interpret this as a feature of semantic alignment within the broadly accusative systems of Germanic languages other than English: the assignment of case for experiencers appear to depend on retroactions between the ontology of the process and the ontology of arguments.

The monograph is wrapped up by a **conclusion** summarizing the findings of the study and
drawing perspectives for future research (section the section “findings” in the present file).

**References mentioned in the summary**

Barðdal, Johanna. 2002. Oblique subjects in Icelandic and German. *Working papers in Scandinavian Syntax* 70. 61-99.

Chafe, Wallace. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view. Li, Charles (ed.), *Subject and Topic*. New York: Academic Press. 25-56.

Croft, William. 2000. *Radical Construction Grammar - Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective*. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keenan, Edward. 1976. Towards a universal definition of “Subject”. Li, Charles (ed.), *Subject and Topic*. New York: Academic Press. 303-334.

Lazard, Gilbert. 1994. *L'actance*. Paris: PUF.
Lazard, Gilbert. 2012. Devoirs de vacance. *Études de linguistique générale, II : La linguistique pure*. Louvain : Peeters. 189-246.

Lefèvre, Michel. 2017. Rhetorik in Romanen? Binäre Satzstrukturen in Romanen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. In Claudia Wich-Reif (ed.), Serialisierungsregeln und ihre Geschichte vom 8. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, 207-230. Berlin: Weidler.

Li, Charles & Sandra Thompson. 1976. Subject and topic: A new typology of language. Li, Charles (ed.), *Subject and Topic*. New York: Academic Press. 457-490.

Rinas, Karsten. 2019. Affinite konstruktionen im Kontext der älteren Rhetorik und Stilistik. Sprachwissenschaft 44(1). 73-109.

Siouffi, Gilles (ed.). 2019. Phrase et période entre les XVIe et XVIIIe siècles. Special issue of *Verbum* 46 (2).

Strawson, Peter Frederick. 1971. The asymmetry of subjects and predicates. In *Logico-linguistic papers*, 96-115. London: Methuen and Co.