The Word Order Indicated by the Syntactical Gloss in the Lambeth Psalter and Issues about Distinction between Adverb and Conjunction

Abstract

The Lambeth Psalter in London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 427 (s. xi1) is a Psalter manuscript made in England during the eleventh century. This manuscript is remarkable for its continuous syntactical gloss, which gives readers some grammatical guidance by presenting the word order in an easy-to-understand fashion. The basic system of the syntactical gloss in the Lambeth Psalter is revealed by Robinson (1973) and O’Neill (1992), yet there seems to be only one study discussing the syntactical feature presented by the Lambeth syntactical gloss: Yamanouchi (2004).
The first purpose of this study is to examine and clarify one of the most distinctive features of the syntax indicated by the Lambeth gloss: the verb-initial word order. This type of word order is strongly preferred through the whole manuscript, and the preference is not attributable to syntax of general Old English texts as observed in Mitchell (1985). After an overview, this study discusses further peculiarities caused by the characteristic word order. Old English has some words used as both conjunction and adverb such as þa and þonne, and in Old English prose the two usages can be distinguished by the word order, especially by the position of the verb. On the other hand, the Lambeth gloss almost always uses the verb-preceding order so that it cannot differentiate the verb position according to the usage of those kinds of Old English words. Then the Lambeth glossator attempts to clarify their usages by adopting both/either of the following two methods: differentiating the adverb position and using the particle þe. These methods are also consistently utilized through the manuscript, which indicates that the glossator was very careful in clarifying the usage of the ambiguous words.
The Lambeth Psalter presents these significant tendencies in glossing, which simplify the word order or clarify the usage of words. Thus, the manuscript and gloss preserve various indications relating to how the glossator was careful in providing readers with grammatical guidance.