The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

136 The syntax of early Englishwere lost. This ties in with current literature in which V-movement strategies arekeyed to the presence of inflectional morphology, e.g. Roberts (1993) andRohrbacher (1994).There are some drawbacks to the postulation of loss of morphology as atrigger for loss of V-movement: the most important reservation may certainlybe that such an analysis of the change has important implications for how languagechange works, for it implies that language learners draw conclusionsabout word order, not on the basis of word order patterns themselves, but onthe basis of inflectional morphology. This recalls our discussion in section 1.2on the question to what extent grammar change can reasonably be supposedto be UG-driven. Let us consider this in some more detail for the case in point:suppose there was some stage at which the word order patterns still give clearevidence for V-movement to F (i.e. we still have robust inversion of nominalsubjects in topic-initial constructions), but agreement morphology lacks therelevant specifications. This scenario allows for the possibility that the languagelearner concludes that the relevant agreement specifications are missingand that the finite verb must hence not be moved to F, even though the wordorder patterns give clear evidence for this. This means that the languagelearner ignores positive word order evidence and constructs a grammar thatsystematically deviates from his language environment. While there are somecase studies in the literature which suggest that this can happen (in particular,Henry (1997); a similar approach is allowed for by the theory presented inClark and Roberts (1993), both discussed in 1.2), many others believe that thisis not how word order change can work. They would prefer an approach inwhich changes in word order patterns are analysed in their own terms, andwould favour an analysis in which we could see that the evidence for certainpatterns becomes too infrequent. For instance, Lightfoot (1999), working onthe cue-based model of grammar acquisition, follows up on the grammarcompetition approach in Kroch and Taylor (1997), and suggests that, as aresult of dialect contact between the Northern and Southern dialects, the cuefeeding into the parameter setting for Verb-Second, verb–subject order aftera topic, fell below the required threshold of robustness. It is unclear, however,whether this hypothesis will stand the test of detailed quantitative investigation,which has yet to be done. We will leave the matter for further exploration.Summarizing, we have considered in this chapter a detailed argumenttowards the proper analysis of Old English word order where it concerns theposition of the finite verb. There is good reason to analyse negative-initial sentencesand questions as involving movement of the finite verb to the C-positionin the structure (72) throughout the history of English. Subject-initial