The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The loss of object–verb word order 139before we come to the theoretical considerations that may play a role inaccounting for this change, we shall need to establish precisely when and howit took place. This is an aspect of the change that has not received much attention.Indeed, one might get the impression from some of the literature that OVorder disappeared completely after the Old English period. But examples suchas (2) and (3) (and we shall give many more in what follows) show that OVremained possible throughout the Middle English period. In fact, it did notdisappear from prose writings until the sixteenth century, while in verse it continuedbeing used as a productive option well into the nineteenth century.And not only did OV order continue after the end of the Old English period;the modern order, VO, is also found before the start of the Middle Englishperiod. This means that, as far as surface order is concerned, the developmentwas more gradual than has often been suggested. It is true that there is a rapidincrease in surface VO order between the Old and Middle English periods, butas we shall show in detail below, this largely takes the form of a shift in frequencyamong patterns already in existence.Section 5.2 contains a descriptive overview of the word order patterns foundin Old English. As shown in chapter 4, there is an operation of V-movementthat affects many clauses containing only one (finite) verb in Old English,obscuring the basic positional patterns of the object vis-à-vis the verb. In thesecond section of this chapter, we shall therefore concentrate on clauses witha non-finite verb, or with a finite verb that has not been fronted. In section 5.3,we will discuss how these Old English clauses are to be analysed. The developmentduring the Middle English period is the topic of sections 5.4 and 5.5. Insection 5.4, the emphasis is on the empirical details of the changes affectingverb-object order. After these have been established, we will consider insection 5.5 how the Middle English data can be analysed. Section 5.6, finally,will deal with the question how a theoretical perspective might illuminate thenature of the changes involving the order of the object and the verb in the Oldand Middle English periods.5.2 Old English: the basic factsIn chapter 2, we saw that the order of object and verb was considerablyfreer in Old English than it is in present-day English. Let us consider thispicture in more detail now. As pointed out above, we will focus the discussionon the position of the non-finite verb and that of the finite verb when it is notfronted. The non-finite verb forms in Old English are the infinitive, and thepresent and past participles.