Article published in:
English Historical Linguistics 2006: Selected papers from the fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006. Volume I: Syntax and Morphology
Edited by Maurizio Gotti, Marina Dossena and Richard Dury
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 295] 2008
► pp. 109–124

On the position of the OE quantifier eall and PDE all

| Chubu University
This paper, through a study of the corpus of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, shows that the quantifier eall in Old English exhibited the same distributional properties as the quantifier all in present-day English: (i) eall can float from a nominative noun phrase (NP) it modifies; (ii) eall can float from an accusative NP when it is followed by a predicative complement; and (iii) the ‘pronoun-quantifier’ order is more frequent than the ‘quantifier-pronoun’ order. The paper also argues that the quantifier eall is base-generated as the head of the Quantifier Phrase (QP) and selects an NP as its complement. The ‘full-NP-quantifier’ order can be derived by adjoining the NP to the QP. However, this operation is not applied to an NP in the argument position, due to the ban on adjunction to arguments. Unlike NPs, pronouns are adjoined to the head of a QP, yielding the ‘pronoun-quantifier’ order more freely.
Published online: 09 July 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.295.09yan