The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The loss of object–verb word order 159in Old English, which is all formulated from the perspective of underlying OVorder for Old English, argues that, since Old English has OV order, thepreposition must be on the left for a well-formed movement chain to beformed between the moved prepositional object and its trace (we leave technicaldetails aside). On the assumption of VO underlying order, such an accountis not open to us. However, given that stranded prepositions in Old English arealways adjacent to the verb, we could say that they form a lexical combinationwith the verb, in the spirit of the rule of V–P reanalysis formulated byHornstein and Weinberg (1981) for preposition stranding in present-dayEnglish. This amounts to saying that stranded prepositions in Old Englishwere somewhat like (possibly valency-changing) prefixes. While we realize thatthis cuts a number of corners, we will leave it at that, pending further researchinto the precise status of stranded prepositions.Let us now turn to particles, whose position is predominantly like that ofstranded prepositions: they usually occur on the immediate left of a nonmovedverb, as illustrated in examples such as (10), which we repeat here.(10) æt hie mid æm æt folc ut aloccodenthat they with that the people out enticed‘that with it they might entice the people to come outside’ (Or 2.5.3.117.5)Having said this, we should also note that the position of particles is not asnarrowly defined as that of stranded prepositions, in a way which suggeststhat, although they most often occur in immediate preverbal position, theydiffer from stranded prepositions in not being positionally dependent on V.This implies that they have independent syntactic status. Zwart (1993), in aminimalist VO-based analysis of Modern Dutch syntax, analyses particles assecondary predicates. On such an analysis, the sequence æt folc ut in (10) isbase-generated in postverbal position as a small clause, with ut as the predicate;it then moves for feature checking, much like the movement of infinitivesdiscussed above. This will be discussed in more detail in chapter 6.Let us now turn to that-clauses and to-infinitives, the former of which arealways in final position, as are the latter with very few exceptions. On a VOanalysis, this means that, unlike other types of objects, that-clauses and toinfinitivesdo not move to a higher functional projection such as AgrOP. Sincethe model of clause structure adopted above only allows movement which istriggered by the need for feature-checking, the obvious conclusion is that OldEnglish that-clauses and to-infinitives do not have a feature that needs to bechecked, and hence do not move. Again, this conclusion raises wider issuesthat are still awaiting adequate treatment in the literature, but for our purposesat this point, it suffices to note that the behaviour of these elements does notendanger the account of word order that we are exploring in this section.