The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The loss of object–verb word order 151that there is a great deal of indeterminacy. It is also noteworthy that Pintzukdoes not say much about what triggered the introduction of VO order in (early)Old English, or what led to the loss of OV order in the Middle English period.It therefore remains to be seen whether an analysis in terms of phrase structurecompetition offers a profitable research strategy. With these critical comments,we in no way wish to detract from the value of the observationsconcerning variation made by Pintzuk. But it might well be the case that thelocus of the variation, i.e. its place within the grammatical system, is different,and we will explore a possible alternative in the next section.5.3.2 Towards a VO analysisIn this section we will work towards an analysis of Old English wordorder in terms of a VO underlying structure. It was observed above that thereare no complete analyses of Old English object position available from agenerative perspective. Some approaches to Old English word order observethat SVO seems the most likely underlying order (e.g. Malsh 1976, Allen 1980,Reddick 1982), but these works do not offer a fully fleshed-out proposal as tohow the patterns deviating from this order are to be analysed. This is what wewill attempt here. The analysis is theoretically inspired by innovations proposedby Chomsky (1993) and Kayne (1994).In chapters 1 and 4, we introduced the idea that sentences may have a ratherelaborate functional structure in the sense that certain elements of morphology– subordination marking, tense, agreement, mood, negation and so on –project their own phrasal category according to the standard format of X’theory. Lexical heads and phrases may subsequently move to the head positionor specifier position of these functional phrases to be associated with therelevant morphology. This type of morphologically driven movement hasbecome an important element in the typology of word order. One of thecentral ideas introduced by Chomsky (1991) and further constrained inChomsky (1993) is that movement can only take place to satisfy a morphologicalfeature. When such a feature is ‘strong’, movement takes place in the overtsyntax; when a feature is ‘weak’, movement is not visible but does take placeat the semantic interface level LF. In Kayne (1994), a further constraint onsentence structure is proposed which is of prime importance from the perspectiveof word order variation: he proposes that the relation of c-commandis fundamentally asymmetric, and that (by virtue of a principle that he callsthe Linear Correspondence Axiom, for which we refer to his work) this translatesinto phrase structures in which specifiers can only be generated on theleft, and complements must always follow the head. Moreover, adjunction toa phrase can only take place on the left. This leaves no room for variation in