The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

134 The syntax of early Englishrather long periods. In Nevalainen’s Corpus ofEarly English Correspondences,the inversion figures are even lower.Another general problem with the figures available in the literature is thatno distinction is made between finite lexical verbs and (pre)modals.Nevertheless, this distinction may well be vitally important in view of thechanges in the (pre)modals taking place around this time, as discussed inchapter 1. For instance, in chapter 5 we will see that in the fifteenth century,some word order phenomena are restricted to environments with an ‘auxiliary’.Clearly, this remains to be sorted out further, on the basis of quantitativeanalysis of a substantial corpus, with special attention to a distinctionbetween lexical finite verbs and modals and other auxiliaries in the making inthe fifteenth century and perhaps to possible differences between texts thatreflect colloquial speech more closely, and others. Pending such furtherresearch, we cannot but draw the conclusion that inversion, i.e. V-movementto F, although possibly subject to widely varying individual or stylistic differences,was not lost before the eighteenth century. This date raises the questionof how the loss of V to F is related to what is in the literature called the lossof V to I, as in Roberts (1985), Kroch (1989), Lightfoot (1997) and Warner(1997). On the analysis of Old English Verb-Second of Pintzuk (1991) andKroch and Taylor (1997), where Verb-Second is analysed as V to I, one wouldexpect the change we identify here as the loss of V to F, and that of the loss ofV to I, to be identical. There is evidence against this: the loss of V to I is generallyassumed to be correlated with the rise of do-support; this correlation ismade particularly forcefully by Kroch (1989). If the loss of V to F and the lossof V to I are the same thing, Kroch’s constant rate account breaks down, sinceV to F saw a sharp decline in the fifteenth century, some time before the riseof do-support started taking off seriously by the close of the fifteenth century.Moreover, there is some independent evidence for a separate V-movementstrategy, V-to-T movement as in Roberts (1995), the loss of which set in later,and whose dating seems to tally more closely with the loss of V to I as discussedin the literature. While fine-grained quantitative research remains to bedone, it seems safest to say that the loss of V to F and the loss of V to T (inthe literature V to I) are separate developments, each with their own rate ofchange.Whatever the details, it is of some interest to consider the nature of thischange. Van Kemenade (1987) attributes it to the changing character ofsubject pronouns: whereas previously they behaved like weak pronouns (interms of the analysis in the present chapter, they occupied FP), this specialbehaviour was lost, and as a result nominal and pronominal subjects began tobehave alike, which triggered the loss of V-movement to C, or, in our analysis