George Walkden Null Subjects in the Lindisfarne Gospels as Evidence for Syntactic Variation in Old English

This paper assesses the evidence for nuU subjects in Old English, demonstrating that in the Old English gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels subjects are omitted in a way not found in classical West Saxon texts. The obvious hypothesis that this difference is simply due to the nature of the text as a gloss of a Latin original, and thus teUs us nothing about the syntax of Old English is unlikely to be correct, since null subjects occur frequently only in the third person, not in the first and second persons. In Latin null subjects are permitted and occur in all of these contexts without restriction. The omitted subjects in the Lindisfarne gloss thus seem to represent a genuine (Northumbrian) Old English syntactic possibility; support for this conclusion is drawn from a new quantit tive study of the Gospel of John. The results of the study therefore indicate that a text such as Aldred's gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels, despite its glossal nature, can contribute to our understanding of the comparative syntax of Old English dialects if appropriate caution is employed.