As Who Say / Saith revisited: form and function

I have earlier established that as who followed by the verb to say first appeared as a parenthetic phrase in Early Middle English religious texts and commentaries translated from Latin or in quotations borrowed from the writings of the Fathers in the volumes of Patrologia Latina. It corresponded to the hypothetical parenthetic Latin clause ac si/quasi dicat/dicer et "as if he said/ were saying" and the like, in model texts, which referred to the subject of the preceding statement, along with others with unambiguously impersonal reference, e.g., ac si (aperte) diceretur "as if it were (openly) said." The Latin phrase with personal reference was first regularly translated with a personal subject, e.g., Swylce he cwcede in jElfric, or Ase ƥauh;auh he seide in Ancrene, but during the first half of the thirteenth century an impersonal structure with the indefinite pronoun who(so) as subject was extended to passages where the Latin model text contained a personal subject (Nevanlinna 1974).