On the givenness of OV word order: a (re)examination of OV/VO variation in Old English

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 (Taylor et 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.

Information structure and OV word order in Old and Middle English: a phase-based approach

“…Stripping the data of such structural assumptions yields new insights into the nature of OV/VO variation. We show, following up on Struik and van Kemenade (2020), that discourse-given, lexical objects are optionally OV, but that new objects are near-categorically VO. We treat texts translated from Latin separately and compare them to native OE, demonstrating that translations induce a higher proportion of (new) OV in the OE translation.…”

“…The results presented here build on the data collection in Struik and van Kemenade (2020). 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).…”

“…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). 3 We refer the reader to Struik and van Kemenade (2020) and the appendix for the full details regarding our coding scheme. The overall results are given in Table 1.…”

On the syntax of object pronouns in Old English and Early Middle English

“…Given that the aim is to relate the different mappings of pronouns to the ongoing language change from linear OV to linear VO, it is appropriate to briefly give some background on the matter. According to Hinterhölzl (2017), Struik and van Kemenade (2018) and De Bastiani (2019), the mapping of constituents in OE was driven by IS and prosodic factors. Given (nominal and pronominal) objects are typically mapped in pre-verbal position, but a progressively more frequent spell-out of non-pronominal objects in post-verbal position can be noticed already in the OE period.…”

“…The rising post-verbal mapping of definite DPs leads to a mixed system, in which all types of non-pronominal objects are spelled-out in post-verbal position, whereas pronouns are still spelled-out either in pre-verbal or in pre-T position. Struik and van Kemenade (2018) and De Bastiani (2019) show that the predictions are met: in OE, the givenness of non-pronominal object prompts their mapping into a preverbal position, even in cases where the object is branching. However, it can be noticed that an increasing post-verbal spell-out of non-pronominal objects due to their heaviness is already at work.…”