Abstract
This article re-examines the evidence for OV and VO variation and the loss of OV order in historical English, and presents a novel and unified analysis of Old and Middle English word order based on a uniform VO grammar, with leftward scrambling of specific types of objects. This analysis provides an insightful framework for a precise analysis of how OV word orders differ from VO word orders. We show in detail that OV with referential objects involves discourse-given objects. We then present a phase-based analysis from a VO base in which objects undergo feature-driven movement to spec,vP triggered by the information structure of the object. We propose that this analysis also yields a syntactic framework for analysing the derivation of preverbal quantified and negated objects, as well as a natural explanation for the stepwise loss of OV word order.
Highlights
This article re-examines the evidence for object-verb (OV) and verb-object (VO) variation in Old English (OE) and Middle English ((e)ME) and the subsequent loss of OV order
We demonstrate that the position and distribution of quantified and negated objects parallels that of referential discoursegiven objects, pace Pintzuk and Taylor (2006), who claim that their distribution and frequency is fundamentally different from that of other OV word orders
We identified the information status (IS) of objects occuring in subclauses with two verbs by compiling a dataset from the YCOE corpus (Taylor et al 2003), using CorpusStudio (Komen 2011) and annotating it according to a tripartite givennew-inert information structure coding scheme, based on the Pentaset annotation scheme (Komen 2013)
Summary
This article re-examines the evidence for object-verb (OV) and verb-object (VO) variation in Old English (OE) and (early) Middle English ((e)ME) and the subsequent loss of OV order. We will present a novel and unified analysis of OE word order based on a VO grammar with leftward scrambling of specific types of objects. We demonstrate that the position and distribution of quantified and negated objects parallels that of referential discoursegiven objects, pace Pintzuk and Taylor (2006), who claim that their distribution and frequency is fundamentally different from that of other OV word orders. To account for these facts, we present a VO-based analysis in which referential given objects are raised to preverbal position as the result of feature checking requirements.
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