This chapter keys the rise of to-datives to the loss of dative case and views it as a continuation of the older direct-indirect object order, where the indirect case was marked for a dative case. It adopts Harley's (1999) adaptation of Larson's VP-shell analysis and treats a wide range of data from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English. It shows that the to-dative first emerged in early Middle English as the morphological case system collapsed in most dialects. The chapter offers a careful analysis of various movement operations, arguing for a single base order for to-datives. This permits the argument that what is constant is the fact the indirect objects at all stages received oblique case; what changed is that oblique was once realized by overt case-marking but came later to be realized as a PP.
In this article, we investigate the peculiar distribution of the auxiliaries have and be in Earlier English and its consequences for theories of the perfect and auxiliary selection. We argue on the basis of a largescale corpus study that the periphrastic construction with be was restricted to a stative resultative interpretation, whereas that with have developed a wider range of uses, crucially including the experiential perfect in addition to resultatives. Support comes from comparing the Earlier English patterns with related ones in Norwegian and German for which native-speaker judgments are available. On the basis of this insight, we propose distinct formal analyses for the two constructions and show how they account for the attested patterns and changes in Middle and Early Modern English. Of particular theoretical relevance is the premise that what has been called the ''perfect'' is not a homogeneous, monolithic category, and that certain kinds of variation can only be understood by teasing apart the pieces involved. Earlier English and German auxiliaries have distinct distributions because their ''perfects'' have disinct syntactic and semantic makeups.
It is argued that long-distance case assignment does not actually exist. Unlike longdistance agreement, it would necessarily violate the Phase Impenetrability Condition. All examples that have been analyzed in terms of long-distance case actually involve the appearance of the nominative as the default case. Cases that are actually assigned-the accusative and the non-structural cases-always obey locality. Yet assignment of the accusative does appear to violate cyclicity. This problem can however be solved as well with the right view on when case is assigned, once the dependency between structural accusatives and other DPs is properly understood. As a result, the alternative solution put forward by Sigurðsson (2006b), requiring that subjects first-merge lower than objects, is shown to be unnecessary.
In this paper I examine patterns of irregular allomorphy in nominal stems sensitive to case in a number of nominative-accusative languages. I will argue that the data surveyed reveal a certain regularity in the distribution of irregularity across the cases in that they conform to what I call the Nominative Stem-Allomorphy Generalization. One irregular stem form is always found in the nominative (and in other cases that may be systematically syncretic with it), with all other cases sharing a single other stem form. I will show that this subsumes a clear instance of a *ABA pattern, and in fact is even more restrictive, as it also shows *ABC and (qualified) *AAB. I will situate these findings relative to recent work on *ABA patterns and on case-sensitive irregularity in noun and pronoun suppletion, and then will build on that prior work to propose an account for the generalization in terms of a structured representation of nouns and case categories interacting with locality conditions on allomorphy.
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