The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

160 The syntax of early EnglishThe preverbal elements that we have not discussed so far are personal pronouns,negative ne and certain adverbs. For the first two, an account wasalready suggested in chapter 4: personal pronouns check a feature in a relativelyhigh position preceding NegP and negative ne is a NegP head whichincorporates with the finite verb.We may conclude this section with the observation that a Kayne-style VOaccount of Old English word order faces some empirical problems, for whichwe have tried to sketch possible theoretical solutions in this section. The successof this account depends on the feasibility of these solutions, and on the potentialfor finding more of them. We now turn to an investigation of how this sameaccount fares when it is applied to the word order data and the changes thatthey show in the Middle English period, on the assumption that, if the accountsucceeds in throwing light on these changes without assuming drastic discontinuities,some support is provided for the overall approach. But before weturn in 5.5 and 5.6 to such theoretical issues raised by the Middle English data,we first present in 5.4 a brief descriptive account of these data themselves.5.4 Middle English: the basic factsWe have seen that, in the Old English period, the object sometimesfollows the finite verb even when it has not been moved and that it sometimesalso follows the non-finite verb. In both cases, the result is VO order. Sentenceswith this order become more frequent during the Middle English period, andit is the empirical details of that development that we shall trace in this section.The change in question has of course not escaped the attention of earlierinvestigators of word order in Old and Middle English, but there have beensurprisingly few attempts at a comprehensive quantitative study of it. In thissection, we shall therefore be drawing on a number of separate small-scalestudies focussing on individual subperiods. Moreover, some of the existingdescriptions of Middle English word order do not take into account the possibleeffects of V-movement; as will be clear from chapter 4, however, failureto do so will result in an inadequate picture of the patterns involved. In a studythat recognizes this potential problem, Kroch and Taylor (1994) consider theposition of the object in embedded clauses containing a finite auxiliary and anon-finite lexical verb in several prose texts from the early thirteenth century(the Katherine group and Ancrene Riwle, from the West Midlands; Vices andVirtues, Trinity Homilies and the Kentish Sermons, all from the South-East).Kroch and Taylor distinguish three positions for objects: following the nonfiniteverb, as in (52), in between finite and non-finite verb, as in (53), and precedingthe finite verb, as in (54).