---
title: "The Information Status of Old English Constructions with Titles"
description: "Old English has three ways to pair a personal name with a rank noun: Ælfred cyning (bare title after the name), Ælfred se… 18 references."
authors: ["Elżbieta Sielanko-Byford"]
year: 2015
venue: "LingBaW 1"
source: "https://czasopisma.kul.pl/index.php/LingBaW/article/view/5632"
doi: "10.31743/lingbaw.5632"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; LingBaW)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sielanko-byford-2015-information-status-old-english-constructions/"
---
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# The Information Status of Old English Constructions with Titles and Proper Names

**Authors:** Elżbieta Sielanko-Byford · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** [LingBaW 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/linguistics-beyond-and-within-lingbaw/) ([Linguistics Beyond and Within (LingBaW) 2015](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/linguistics-beyond-and-within-lingbaw/2015/)) · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; LingBaW)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.31743/lingbaw.5632) · [PDF](https://czasopisma.kul.pl/index.php/LingBaW/article/download/5632/5366) · [DOI 10.31743/lingbaw.5632](https://doi.org/10.31743/lingbaw.5632) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2513652225)

**Citations:** 2 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Old English has three ways to pair a personal name with a rank noun: *Ælfred cyning* (bare title after the name), *Ælfred se cyning* (title with determiner after the name) and *se cyning Ælfred* (title with determiner before the name). No native speakers survive to say how these differ. The paper therefore looks for a difference in discourse use instead of meaning. It applies Prince's taxonomy of information status (Discourse-old, Discourse-new, Inferrable) to examples from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, 2000 Release: Chronicle manuscripts A and E, the Old English Orosius and Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Hearer knowledge from a millennium ago is hard to reconstruct, so the analysis relies mostly on textual evidence of prior mention. The *se cyning Ælfred* type turns out to be strongly anaphoric. Most tokens point back to an already introduced referent, usually one mentioned nearby. This explains where the pattern occurs. It clusters in long, character-centred narratives with anaphoric chains (Bede, later Chronicle E). It is rare in terse annals and summary history (Chronicle A, early E, Orosius).

## Key points
- *se cyning Ælfred* counts across the three texts: 296 Discourse-old (about 91%), 9 Inferrable (about 3%) and 20 Discourse-new (about 6%).
- The other two types are less anaphoric. Roughly 70% of *Ælfred se cyning* and *Ælfred cyning* tokens are Discourse-old.
- Locality of antecedents differs by type:
  - Close to 80% of Discourse-old *se cyning Ælfred* tokens have a local antecedent, in the same or the immediately preceding structural unit.
  - The figure is about 60% for *Ælfred se cyning* and about 50% for *Ælfred cyning*.
  - Over half of all *se cyning Ælfred* tokens find their antecedent within the same unit. This seems to contradict the hierarchical approach, which expects reduced forms there rather than full NPs.
- Several Discourse-new cases sit in Bede's Preface. They are either deictic or exophoric (the addressee, king Ceolwulf) or well-known figures who can be treated as Hearer-old (Pope Gregory, abbot Albinus, bishop Cynebyrht).
- Every Inferrable has a local trigger and counts as a conceptual indirect anaphor. Examples are kingdom → king/queen and pope → Rome, which rely on world knowledge rather than lexical knowledge.

## Interesting ideas
- When speaker intuitions are unavailable, function can be inferred from distribution: measure how often a construction refers back, and how far back, rather than guessing its meaning.
- Antecedent distance is measured in two ways, by discourse units (same or previous) and by linear distance, and the two are compared across construction types.
- A definite title plus name (e.g. "the king Alfred") behaves mainly as a re-mention, while other orders introduce referents more often.
- Indirect anaphors are anchored through frame knowledge (a kingdom has a king, a pope belongs to Rome), and their triggers are local.
- How often anaphoric forms appear is explained by genre: long stories about recurring characters need anaphoric chains, while short annal entries do not.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Unclear constructions in silver data could be profiled by antecedent rate and distance, giving an objective signal instead of an LLM teacher's intuition.
- **I2** (frames): The coreference resolver could log both distances per mention type, setting search windows per construction rather than one global window.
- **I3** (frames): Coreference could use the title-before-name pattern as a strong cue to link to an earlier entity rather than create a new one.
- **I4** (world): The world builder could add bridging links from role nouns to recently mentioned institutions using ontology relations from WordNet/Wikidata, searching only a short window back.
- **I5** (answer): Fable and tale readers can expect dense chains to the same character, so the expected rate of re-mentions should be tuned per genre when debugging QA errors.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Elżbieta Sielanko-Byford. 2015. The Information Status of Old English Constructions with Titles and Proper Names. LingBaW 1.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{sielankobyford2015information,
  title = {{The Information Status of Old English Constructions with Titles and Proper Names}},
  author = {Elżbieta Sielanko-Byford},
  booktitle = {LingBaW 1},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.31743/lingbaw.5632},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.31743/lingbaw.5632}
}
```

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18 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 24 October 2026*