Observaciones sobre la posición de los complementos circunstanciales en la prosa de los Paston, 1425-1450

Abstract

In this study, the letters written by the Pastons between 1425 and 1450 supply the evidence for a detailed analysis of a usually neglected aspect of fifteenth-century English syntax; the position and relative ordering of adverbials. Crucial use is made of the tagmemic concepts of nucleus and periphery to identify the relevant positions, and a large inventory of adverbial complements is postulated and classified, according to the positional preferences of each of them, into centripetal and centrifugal elements. Severe ordering restrictions are discovered for the nuclear adverbials and clear preferences for most peripheral ones, and and attempt is made to explain them in terms of the principles of nuclearity, length, end-focus, logical and topological coherence and avoidance of ambiguity. The study contains abundant examples and a chart summarizing all the ordering possibilities attested in the corpus.