Pronouns and Word Order in Old English

Bergen, Linda van

doi:10.4324/9781315686974

Cited by 1 publication

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“…While it might be argued that pronouns are always preverbal because they are prototypically given, their syntactic status is different from that of full DPs. Pronouns are prosodically light elements and might be analyzed as clitics (see Van Kemenade 1987;Van Bergen 2003;Pintzuk 2005 and the sources cited there for discussion of the status of pronouns in Old English; and Zwart 1996 for a discussion of Dutch weak pronouns as clitics). We also excluded clausal objects as these are categorically VO (cf.…”

Section: Materials and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

When information structure exploits syntax: The relation between the loss of VO and scrambling in Dutch

Struik¹,

Schoenmakers²

2022

J. Ling.

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This paper addresses the relation between two types of word order variation in two stages of Dutch: OV/VO variation in historical Dutch and scrambling in present-day Dutch. Information structural considerations influence both types of word order variation, and we demonstrate by means of a comprehensive corpus study that they have a comparable pattern: given objects tend to appear earlier in the sentence than new objects. We infer from this that the two types of word order variation are diachronically related. Our findings support an analysis of scrambling as object movement from a uniformly head-initial base via the specifier of VP to the specifier of vP. We argue that historical Dutch allows spell out of the object in its postverbal base position, but that this possibility was eventually lost. Consequently, the boundary between the given and new domains shifts from the verb to the adverbial.

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Section: Materials and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%