The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

122 The syntax of early Englishin topic-initial sentences, leads Pintzuk to conclude that V-movement in nonrootclauses and topic-initial root clauses is essentially the same, and that tothat extent Old English Verb-Second involves V-movement to I, with the topicin Spec,IP. Verb-Second in questions, negative-initial and a-initial contexts istruly asymmetric and involves V-movement to C, with the first constituent inSpec,CP. Observe that this account predicts that Verb-Second with topicalizationoccurs in non-root clauses as well as in root clauses.Let us now consider some advantages and drawbacks of Pintzuk’s account.The dual phrase structure proposed in conjunction with the hypothesis that V-movement is symmetric between topic-initial root clauses and non-rootclauses, yields a clear rationale for some of the core word order patterns in OldEnglish. It was observed above that there is a minority pattern where the finiteverb is not fronted in root clauses. An example is repeated here for convenience:(62) a folc him betweonum ful x winter a gewin wraciendethe peoples them between full ten winters the fight carrying-onwæronwere‘The peoples kept up the fight between them for a full ten years’(Or 1.11.32.6)This can be accounted for straightforwardly by assuming that here the I-finaloption of (58b) is at work, with movement of the finite verb to sentence-finalI. Similarly, the patterns with V-fronting in non-root clauses can be viewed asinstances of the I-medial option (58a), as was discussed above. Some criticalremarks are also in order, however. The first is that, even though these patternsare attested in root as well as non-root clauses, there are massive differences infrequency between the two types of clause, which are left unaccounted for. 4 TheV-final pattern is a very minor one in root clauses; the work of Koopman (1995)shows that it ranges from 0.5 to 6 per cent. Conversely, V-fronting is very muchless frequent in non-root clauses than in root clauses. Secondly, there is also aset of patterns for which the hypothesis that V-fronting can occur in non-root4Pintzuk’s are the only precise figures available in the literature. She states that 84.7per cent of main clauses are I-medial (with V-movement to I), and 48.9 per cent ofembedded clauses. This is on the basis of a corpus of about 3,800 examples, from 19texts/text fragments. Pintzuk’s percentages, however, are biassed by counting allcoordinate clauses as main clauses. In chapter 2.2.3, we discussed briefly the wordorder of coordinate clauses, noting that with respect to word order, coordinateclauses often behave as subordinate clauses. This means that, if we were to discountcoordinate clauses, the percentages for main clauses would be higher, while for subordinateclauses they would be lower, perhaps considerably. More work needs to bedone here.