The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The loss of object–verb word order 157traditionally observed correlation between rich inflection and freedom ofword order, though this remains to be worked out.Another solution would be to apply to Old English the analysis of theModern Icelandic facts proposed by Kitahara (1995: 67–74). He argues that,if a feature is strong, movement indeed has to take place overtly, but that inother cases, the choice between derivations with overt or covert movementdepends on the number of steps that either derivation will contain. Generally,the shortest derivation will be selected, but if two derivations contain an equalnumber of steps, both will be allowed. This of course raises the question whatexactly will count as a ‘step’ in the derivation; the answer to this question israther technical, and we refer to Kitahara (1995) for a full exposition. Theresult of applying his counting procedure to Icelandic, and equally to OldEnglish, is that both overt and covert movement of the object are allowed,since the number of steps in the two derivations is the same. One of the furtheringredients of Kitahara’s theory of movement too is that, for object movementto the specifier of AgrOP to be overt, there must first be overt V-movementto AgrO. As we shall see in 5.6, this point may have a bearing on thedisappearance of OV order.It thus appears that the problem of optionality might receive a satisfactorysolution within this model of word order, although there are various issuesthat still need to be worked out. There are, however, some further empiricalproblems with the analysis that we are developing here. We stated in 5.2 thatthere are cases where the infinitival verb is to the right of the finite verb,whereas the object of the infinitive appears on the left. We give an examplein (50).(50) æt he Saul ne dorste ofsleanthat he Saul not dared murder‘that he didn’t dare to murder Saul’ (CP 28.199.2)From the perspective of the analysis pursued here, there may be a problemwith these sentences. It seems as if the infinitival complement remains in itsbase position, while the object has moved to the specifier position of thehigher AgrOP. The object of the infinitive can apparently ‘choose’ to move toeither the higher or the lower AgrOP. Since double checking of case is notallowed by the theory (i.e. we cannot say that the object checks case in thelower AgrOP and then again in the higher one), the best solution is probablyto say that AgrOP may freely contain features or lack them. In the case of (50),the lower AgrOP lacks N-features, so the object cannot check its case featuresthere; however, the higher AgrOP does have N-features, and the object canmove on to it for case checking.