Abstract
OV/VO variation in the history of English has been a long-debated issue. Where earlier approaches were concerned with the grammatical status of the variation (see van Kemenade 1987; Pintzuk 1999 and many others), the debate has shifted more recently to explaining the variation from a pragmatic perspective (see Bech 2001; Taylor & Pintzuk 2012a), focusing on the given-before-new hypothesis (Gundel 1988) and its consequences for OV/VO. While the work by Taylor & Pintzuk (2012a) focuses specifically on the newness of VO orders, the present study is particularly concerned with the givenness of OV word order. It is hypothesized that OV orders are the result of leftward movement from VO orders, triggered by givenness. A corpus study on a database of subclauses with two verbs and a direct object, collected from the YCOE (Tayloret al.2003) corpus, and subsequent multinomial regression analysis within a generalized linear mixed model shows that OV word order is reserved for given objects, while VO objects are much more mixed in terms of information structure. We argue that these results are more in line with an analysis which derives all occurring word orders from a VO base than an analysis which proposes the opposite.
Highlights
The grammatical status of OV/VO word order variation in the present-day and medieval varieties of the (West) Germanic languages has been vigorously debated for several decades
This is as true for larger issues of word order typology as for the variation that can be witnessed within one language variety and/or a given historical stage of a language, and the analysis thereof, see for instance see Blom (2002) on Middle Dutch, Walkden (2014) on Old Saxon, Petrova (2009, 2012) on Old High German and van Kemenade (1987), Pintzuk (2005) and Biberauer & Roberts (2005) on Old English, among many others
This article is concerned with OV/VO word order variation in Old English (OE) from a pragmatic perspective
Summary
The grammatical status of OV/VO word order variation in the present-day and medieval varieties of the (West) Germanic languages has been vigorously debated for several decades. This is as true for larger issues of word order typology as for the variation that can be witnessed within one language variety and/or a given historical stage of a language, and the analysis thereof, see for instance see Blom (2002) on Middle Dutch, Walkden (2014) on Old Saxon, Petrova (2009, 2012) on Old High German and van Kemenade (1987), Pintzuk (2005) and Biberauer & Roberts (2005) on Old English, among many others. The debate has shifted from discussing the structural implications of this word order variation to the variation itself, focusing on the influence of information structure ( IS) and weight of the object (Taylor & Pintzuk 2012a, b)
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