The survival of object-verb order in Middle English: Some data

This article sets out to clarify the contribution of syntactic properties and subject weight for variation between verb-subject and subject-verb order in a database of fourteenthand fifteenth-century prose. It sets out the syntactic structures which are assumed, and investigates the impact on ordering of a set of factors, using established quantitative methodologies. A series of conclusions includes the continuing distinct status of initial then, the systematic importance of clause-final position, the different impacts of subject length in different contexts, and the presence of a definiteness effect for the late placement of a subject after a nonfinite unaccusative. 1 I am delighted to acknowledge a research readership granted by the British Academy which gave me the time to collect the data investigated here, and the comments of audiences atIn today's English the choice of order in such clause types seems to involve both syntactic and other factors. The reversed order is clearly required with BE when its predicate is fronted as in (1a), and it is promoted by the presence of an unaccusative verb as in (1b-d). It has also been suggested that it involves the structuring of information. Birner (1994: 233) claimed that the ordering of examples like (1) above in a present-day corpus 'depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed constituents', so that information that is more familiar precedes information that is less familiar, in line with the general view (variously defined, and expressed in different terms by different theorists) that 'given' information precedes 'new' information. But it may not only be the relative information status of constituents that is involved here. Wasow (2002) discusses factors which are relevant to the choice of a particular order of postverbal constituents in several constructions in Present-day English where variation in order is found. He notes that the comparative grammatical weight of a constituent (potentially defined in terms of its length or its grammatical complexity) plays a major role, with a strong tendency for less weighty constituents to precede more weighty constituents, and he goes on to suggest that utterance planning may be a crucial factor underlying this tendency. He also presents evidence that in at least some constructions weight and information structuring are distinct parameters, though in general their contribution is difficult to distinguish (2002: 69-81). Both of course are likely to reflect the planning and production, and the parsing and perception of utterances. Wasow notes more generally that the question of what factors motivate the selection of a particular order is a complex one with 'no simple answer ' (2002: 109). See Culicover & Levine (2001) for some further recent discussion and analysis of inversion in Present-day English, Green (1980) and Stockwell (1984) for earlier discussion.It is clear that information structuring and grammatical weight also had considerable importance in earlier E...

Section: Internal Contextsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Parameters of variation between verb–subject and subject–verb order in late Middle English

Warner¹

2007

“…Foster & van der Wurff (1995) present data showing that all kinds of objects in all kinds of clauses can still be preverbal in this period. Foster & van der Wurff (1995) present data showing that all kinds of objects in all kinds of clauses can still be preverbal in this period.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Object–verb order in early sixteenth-century English prose: an exploratory study

Moerenhout

Wurff

2005

Self Cite

Object-verb order in early sixteenth-century English prose: an exploratory study 1Recent work on word-order change in the history of English has shown that late Middle English prose retains object-verb order as a productive option in contexts with an auxiliary and a quantified or negated object, and also in topicalization structures. In order to determine when these limited types of object-verb order became impossible, we have examined a collection of sixteenth-century prose texts. Our findings are that the patterns attested in late Middle English in fact continue until 1550, but then appear to dwindle away. We present the relevant object-verb data, discuss the reasons for the survival of the patterns found, provide an explanation for a difference at the level of detail between the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century data, and offer some suggestions about the reasons for the eventual loss of the structures in question.

“…Some use a wide definition of the terms (e.g. Foster & van der Wurff 1995), while others calculate OV and VO only from clauses containing a periphrastic verb phrase (Pintzuk 1999;Allen 2000;Fischer et al 2000;Koopman 2005;Pintzuk & Taylor 2006). 1 Moreover, these terms sometimes carry a more general typological meaning, equalling Greenberg's (1963) SOV/SVO classification.…”

Section: A Note On Terminologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Pintzuk (1995Pintzuk ( , 1999 was mentioned above, while a number of other generative studies have explored the nature and extent of OV order in Middle English. Allen (2000) and Kroch & Taylor (2000) point to the frequent occurrence of OV order in early Middle English, and it has also been demonstrated that OV was productive in limited contexts later in the Middle English period (Foster & van der Wurff 1995;Moerenhout & van der Wurff 2000) and even into early Modern English (Moerenhout & van der Wurff 2005). Pintzuk & Taylor (2006: 272) conclude that the loss of OV order took place over a long period of time, and at different rates for different object types.…”

Section: The Change From Old English To Middle Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the use of data in historical linguistics: word order in early English subordinate clauses

Heggelund¹

2014

This article critically assesses Lightfoot's (1991, 2006) ‘degree-0 theory’ of language change, specifically the use that Lightfoot makes of empirical data from Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME). This is followed by the presentation of a recent analysis of word order in a variety of OE and ME sources. It is argued that data from these periods do not support the ‘degree-0 theory’. Rather, the data demonstrate that verb-final and object–verb order were less dominant in OE subordinate clauses than previously assumed, and that the shift to SV order was fairly gradual. There is also little in the data to suggest that subordinate clauses and main clauses developed in radically different manners or at radically different speeds. The article highlights the importance of careful data usage, both with respect to type and scope of material, and the interpretation of data collected and categorised by others.