Abstract

A king was typically referred to as people's king in the early period of Old English, whereas today, king of a country is the most commonly used. This study attempts to trace the development of the place element modifying the title paired in apposition with a personal name in the tradition of vernacular English historiography as represented by the Peterborough Chronicle. There existed a strong tendency to specify a smaller land area (city, town, etc.) with the genitive form of the name of the place or with a prepositional phrase involving the place‐name and a larger one (kingdom, shire, etc.) with the genitive form of the name of the people living there in Early Old English. In later periods, however, the prepositional phrase was left as the only place element available for either a smaller or larger land area. Various prepositions heading the prepositional phrase became limited during the Old English period to just one in Early Middle English. Thus, the shift from people's king to king of a country was almost complete in Early Middle English. These findings are related to more general patterns of syntactic change in the noun phrase in English to highlight their current relevance.

Abstract

This article is an attempt to determine possible factors that affect the arrangement of a name and the titlekingin apposition in the transitional period from Old English to Middle English from a prosodic perspective as a first step to explain how preferred patterns have shifted from the types represented byAlfred King,the King AlfredandAlfred the Kingin Old English to almost exclusively the type represented byKing Alfredin Present-Day English. Contrary to the common and generally sensible judgment of avoiding poetic texts in a syntactic investigation such as this, the present study analyzes the two extant versions of Laȝamon’sBrut, an Early Middle English metrical chronicle, on the grounds that verse may serve a better purpose than prose when intonation and rhythm are centrally involved, as is the case with this study. Use of searchable large-scale electronic corpora may at first glance seem more suitable for research of this kind, but such studies involving multiple texts of different periods, places and types are prone to oversimplification, and crucial details may be missed or glossed over. For a more detailed and coherent account of the development of appositive constructions, this study provides an in-depth analysis of the linguistic situation in a single body of closely related texts.

In Old English, genitive nouns in apposition are both marked for case. King Arthur's men, for example, would be Arthornures cyninges menn, Arthornures menn thornaes cyninges, among a few other possibilities. Non-agreeing genitive appositives such as Arthornur kinges men and Arthornures men (thorne) king began to appear in the Early Middle English period. The analysis in two versions of La?amon's Brut suggests two possible pathways through which they were established. One is the development of the name and the title as a compound-like unit, which marks genitive only at the end of the second element as in Arthornur kinges men, and the other is ambiguous appositive or predicative expressions such as Arthornures men (thorne) king, interpretable as either King Arthur's men' or men of Arthur, (who is) (the) king', which seem to have led post-head constituents of split genitives to appear in the nominative or unmarked case, resulting in genitive marking only on the pre-head components. These new usages are thus originally and essentially independent of the developments of the case-marking system itself.