The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

150 The syntax of early Englishthose constituents that may occur preverbally (object NPs, PPs, bare infinitives),obligatorily to those constituents that must occur preverbally (personalpronouns, stranded prepositions, particles, some types of adverb, negative ne),and cannot apply to those constituents which must occur postverbally (finiteclauses and to-infinitives).There are no complete analyses of Old English word order that take the VOperspective. In 5.3.2, we will explore the possibility of analysing Old Englishas having underlying VO structure, pointing out the potential gains of andproblems for such an approach.5.3.1.3 Variation between OV and VO orderIn recent work, Susan Pintzuk (1991, 1996) analyses Old Englishword order from the perspective of variation between two different phrasestructures. This is inspired by Kroch’s (1989) approach to synchronic variationin terms of grammar competition, which was discussed in 1.2.4. We will brieflyrecall the essence of this approach here. In the course of any syntactic change,which typically follows an S-curve, there is a transitional stage in which theolder and newer patterns are attested side by side at shifting frequencies. Fromthe perspective of a restrictive theory of grammar, we have to assume, accordingto Kroch, that these patterns represent grammars in competition, grammarswhich differ in the value for one parameter, in this case the onedetermining the word order inside the VP.Pintzuk takes the earliest Old English, as represented by the language ofBeowulf, to reflect an OV grammar, following Pintzuk and Kroch (1989), andtraces the earliest evidence for VO orders in the Old English prose. The exceptionalcases of postverbal particles, as in (12), and personal pronouns, as in(18) and (19), are taken as diagnostics for VO basic word order. She then goeson to analyse the transition from Old English to Middle English in terms ofcompetition between an OV grammar and a VO grammar. During the OldEnglish period, VO is a relatively small minority pattern. In the transition toMiddle English, it gains ground rapidly and OV order becomes a minoritypattern. The change follows the type of S-shaped curve discussed in chapter 1.Pintzuk’s analysis provides a good way of modelling the time course of thechange. Nevertheless, some critical observations seem in order. In Pintzuk’sanalysis of Old English, the crucial evidence for a VO grammar comes from verysmall minority patterns. This means that a vast majority of the attested patterns,which comprise many OV as well as VO orders, are derivable from OV basestructure. Hence, the analysis may share the gains of both approaches but, toaccommodate only a few patterns, it also needs the full range of rules (includingtheir problems) required by both of them. Moreover, the VO orders amongthe attested patterns are also derivable from a VO base structure, which means