The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The Verb-Second constraint and its loss 129ranging from ninety-one to ninety-four per cent), the figures are equivocal forthe two early texts, Cura Pastoralis and Orosius. There may be several reasonsfor this, not the least of which may be that both are early texts translated fromLatin, which was not a Verb-Second language. Another, more tentative, suggestionthat must await further research is that Verb-Second in topic-initials maybe an innovation in progress in early Old English, the time when both texts werewritten. This suggestion cannot, however, be correct for another text whereinversion of nominal subjects is also variable (occurring in roughly fifty percent of all cases): The Homilies ofWulfstan. Wulfstan was a contemporary ofÆlfric and his thunderous homilies are from the late tenth and early eleventhcenturies. Their different grammatical patterning may be due to their highlyrhetorical character, which tends to take the form of spoken address. Thesesuggestions must, of course, remain somewhat speculative, and a good deal ofmore fine-grained quantitative analysis needs to be done. But we can draw thefollowing conclusions: first of all, Verb-Second in topic-initial constructions asanalysed here is a robust grammatical option in Old English, indeed in ourmost substantial body of texts (the works of Ælfric), it is used in over ninetyper cent of the cases. But other, perhaps competing, grammatical options, arealso employed at varying rates: there is a minority pattern where the finite verbis not moved in root clauses, as noted above; and there are also topic-initial sentenceswhere the finite verb is moved to a position below that of the nominalsubject (hence the varying percentage of non-inversion of nominal subjects).The refinement of the analysis of clausal architecture gained from the factsconcerning multiple sentential negation allows a very precise view of positionswithin the sentence and provides a good basis for further (future) quantitativeresearch.Summarizing this section, we observe that real asymmetric Verb-Second inOld English, involving V-movement to C, is found in wh-initial, negativeinitialand a-initial contexts (beside imperatives, etc., which we have not discussedhere). Topic-initial Verb-Second is slightly different in nature: it isasymmetric because the topic position is Spec,CP; nevertheless it involves atype of V-movement that is also found in non-root clauses, albeit at a considerablylower frequency, and in which V moves to F in the structure (72). Thismovement does not always take place.4.4 Developments after the Old English periodIn the transition from Old to Middle English, the basic Verb-Secondpatterns that we have seen for Old English in the previous section were preserved.The following examples show that, in a variety of texts from various