The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

to those constituents which must occur postverbally (finite clauses and toinfinitives).Let us first go into the possibility of optional leftward movement rules forNPs, PPs, and bare infinitives. Recent theoretical developments as mentionedabove suggest a clear motivation for such leftward movement rules for objectNPs and perhaps bare infinitives, but less clearly for PPs. For object NPs, wecan say that they have to move to the specifier of AgrOP in order to check theircase features. Let us consider an illustration of this, involving example (24),which is repeated here for convenience as (46); the discussion of this exampleillustrates how the position of both object and bare infinitive can be derived.(46) æt he ure sawle fram synna fagnyssum gehælan mægethat he our soul from of-sins ulcers heal can‘that he can heal our soul from the ulcers of sin’ (ÆCHom I, 8.122.24)Assuming as in chapter 4 that there is a functional projection FP into whichthe clausal subject will move, the underlying structure for this sentence wouldbe as in (47). 1(47)FPThe loss of object–verb word order 155SpecheiFF'…AgrOPSpecAgrO'AgrOVPSpect iV'V AgrOPmægeSpec AgrO'AgrOVPSpecV'VgehælanNPure sawle1The representation in the tree diagram presupposes several notions that are supportedin the literature. First, it is assumed that the modal verb is a main verb with some type