Explaining language change: A three step process

Old Icelandic mainly differs from Modern Icelandic in that the
older stage has the (surface) patterns in (9), while the modern
language does not.
(9 ) a. Vfin … Object – Vaux – Vmain
b. Vfin … Vaux – Object – Vmain
c. Vfin … (object) - Vmain – Vaux - (object)
The striking fact is that these three word order patterns have
disappeared from the language at the same time. Note that these
three word order patterns are typical examples of restructuring
in the Modern West Germanic languages, exemplifying, long
distance scrambling, Verb Projection Raising (VPR), and Verb
Raising (VR), respectively. Thus, the change in question can be
characterized as a loss of restructuring in the history of
Icelandic.
3.2 Information structure and OV word order in Older
Icelandic
Although it is a well-known fact that Modern Icelandic has pure
SVO word order, several other orders of the VP-internal
arguments were possible at earlier stages in the history of
Icelandic, including both pure and mixed OV word-order
patterns, in addition to VO word order (cf. Sigurðsson 1988;
Rögnvaldsson 1996; Hróarsdóttir 1996, 2000). The attested OV
word-order patterns were lost at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. In order to have a closer look at Older Icelandic,
Hróarsdóttir (2000) studied the frequency of the different word
order patterns in the VP in various texts dating from the
fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in addition to personal
letters dating from throughout the nineteenth century. These
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