The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The loss of object–verb word order 149(40) æt he nolde niman mancyn neadunga of am deoflethat he not-would take mankind forcibly from the devil‘that he would not have taken mankind forcibly from the devil’(ÆCHom I, 14.1.216.4)The postposing rules must include object NPs, complement and adjunct PPs,that-clauses and to-infinitives, and allow for the possibility that more than onesuch constituent is postposed. Further, we need to account for the fact that theodd personal pronoun, adverb or particle may occur on the right.The excessive power of such postposing rules must surely require considerablemotivation. Moreover, we must assume that they are not obligatory,which from our theoretical perspective may be a problem, as discussed inchapter 1. In addition to this, we should again consider why some classes ofelements are never or almost never postposed: personal pronouns, strandedprepositions, verb particles, negative ne and some adverbs. The motivation forthis need not be the same for all these elements: as we saw in the previouschapter, personal pronouns must appear in certain positions and the same mayapply to adverbs, while we assume negative ne to be a clitic that incorporateswith the finite verb. This leaves stranded prepositions and particles. Theirbehaviour actually seems the least problematic in an OV approach: if adjacencybetween verb and stranded preposition/particle is required forgrammatical reasons, as has often been suggested, it follows from an OVapproach that this type of element should appear canonically on the left; seechapter 6 for detailed discussion of the particle facts from this viewpoint.Let us now briefly consider how the transition to Middle English can beanalysed from the perspective of underlying OV order in Old English. Thereader will recall that there is an increase of VO orders in the transition fromOld English to Middle English. If Old English is analysed as OV, we are boundto regard the transition to Middle English as a change in underlying order fromOV, as in (34a), to VO, as in (34b), perhaps because during late Old English,the frequency of surface VO word orders had increased to such an extent thatthey led to a reinterpretation of VO order as representing underlying order.This is in itself not too problematic, but the result is that the remnant OV ordersin Middle English will then have to be analysed as the result of leftward movementof objects. It remains a question how these rules are to be formulated.5.3.1.2 The VO approachIn the VO approach to Old English word order, the assumption is thatthe constituents of the VP are base-generated postverbally, as in (34b). Thosesurface patterns where VP constituents precede the non-finite verb should bederivable by motivating leftward movement rules that apply optionally to