From syntax to discourse: The function of object-verb order in Late Middle English

Foster, Tony; Wurff, Wim van der

doi:10.1515/9783110814194.135

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…More particularly, we will show that the distribution of DP objects in early Middle English fully supports the idea that OV orders may be derived by discourse‐sensitive scrambling from a VO‐base (cf. Foster & van der Wurff ). In the syntactic analysis presented in the previous section, this can be accounted for by movement of the object DP to an inner specifier of v , as in Old English patterns such as (24a–b).…”

Section: Discourse‐sensitive Scrambling In Middle Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verb particles and OV/VO in the history of English

Elenbaas

Kemenade

2014

Studia Linguistica

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Verb particles (e.g. up, out, off, down, away) are a well‐known and well studied feature of English and of Germanic languages in general. Nevertheless, the functional and categorial status of English verb particles remains debated, and, especially in the diachronic literature on OV/VO word‐order change, this question is typically avoided entirely. This lack of precision about the nature of verb particles is surprising, given the central role attributed to verb particles as diagnostic elements for basic word order. We motivate an analysis of English verb particles as (optionally) projecting intransitive prepositions which function as secondary predicates. In relation to the OV/VO issue, we claim that, although there is a statistically strong cross‐Germanic correlation between the position of verb particles and verb complements, the position of verb particles is not a diagnostic for OV/VO order. To support this claim, we will show that there is no one‐to‐one correspondence a) between Prt–V surface word order and an underlying OV grammar, or b) between V–Prt surface word order and an underlying VO grammar. Moreover, it will be shown that OV order with DP‐objects in early Middle English is highly discourse‐sensitive, suggesting that OV order with DP‐objects is not determined by phrase structure, but by discourse‐sensitive scrambling from a VO base.

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Section: Discourse‐sensitive Scrambling In Middle Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verb particles and OV/VO in the history of English

Elenbaas

Kemenade

2014

Studia Linguistica

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“…We tentatively propose that this was because of the continuing use of expletive there as subject in other contexts, notably affirmative declaratives, with a presentational discourse function that speakers would presumably have continued to exploit; this may have provided support for the continued use of the expletive negative construction. No such discourse motivation would have been available to support negated object displacement, since the preposing of non-negated object NPs for discourse reasons available in earlier Middle English (Foster & van der Wurff, 1997) had clearly disappeared by the time of the Paston data, as we saw earlier. Thus differing discourse factors may have affected the survival of the two constructions.…”

Section: R I C H a R D I N G H A M S U B J E C T D I S P L A C E M E mentioning

confidence: 78%

“…Displaced (preverbal) objects in LME have been given various accounts in a series of articles by van der Wurff ( , 1999 and Foster and van der Wurff (1997). On the basis of mainly literary examples from 14th-and 15th-century English, it was claimed by Foster and van der that preverbal objects tend to convey evoked or inferrable information.…”

Section: P R E V I O U S a C C O U N T S O F A R G U M E N T D I S P mentioning

confidence: 99%

Negated subjects and objects in 15th-century nonliterary English

Ingham

2002

Lang Var Change

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Using a large database of familial correspondence, it is shown that NP positions in 15th-century English were essentially those of Present-Day English, contrary to claims that the syntactic structure of Late Middle English still had a position for preposed object NPs, and that 15th-century English possessed multiple subject constructions with expletive there. The only form of OV order to remain productive in familial correspondence of this period occurred in the configuration: finite verb–negated NP–lexical verb. Neither ordinary NPs nor other quantified NPs were productive in this configuration. It is also shown that negated subject NPs, but not ordinary or other quantified subject types, were commonly found in multiple subject constructions. All these phenomena can be conveniently accounted for in terms of movement to a Neg projection (Haegeman, 1995). A theoretical account of noncanonical subject and object positions in terms of Neg movement thus receives strong empirical support from the distribution of argument NPs in 15th century English.

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“…There are no in-depth studies on OV in later periods of the history of English. In view of the scarcity of examples after EModE, van der Wurff & Foster (1997b) argue that OV is an archaism in Late Modern (LModE) and PDE, while Takizawa's (2012) empirical analysis of OV sentences with predicates governed by the verb make identifies only 79 examples among the 520 million words in the Bank of English corpus of PDE.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Object-Verb in Early Modern English: Modelling Markedness

Guerra

2021

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

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Although Verb-Object (VO) is the basic unmarked constituent order of predicates in Present-Day English, in earlier stages of the language Object-Verb (OV) is the preferred pattern in some syntactic contexts. OV predicates are significantly frequent in Old and Middle English, and are still attested up to 1550, when they “appear to dwindle away” (Moerenhout & van der Wurff 2005: 83). This study looks at OV in Early Modern English (EModE), using a corpus-based perspective and statistical modelling to explore a number of textual, syntactic, and semantic/processing variables which may account for what by that time had already become a marked, though not yet archaic, word-order pattern. The data for the study were retrieved from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (1500–1710) and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c.1410–1695), the largest electronic parsed collections of EModE texts. The findings reveal a preference for OV in speech-related text types, which are less constrained by the rules of grammar, in marked syntactic contexts, and in configurations not subject to the general linearisation principles of end-weight and given-new. Where these principles are complied with, the probability of VO increases.

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From syntax to discourse: The function of object-verb order in Late Middle English

Cited by 4 publications

References 13 publications

Verb particles and OV/VO in the history of English

Verb particles and OV/VO in the history of English

Negated subjects and objects in 15th-century nonliterary English

Object-Verb in Early Modern English: Modelling Markedness

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