The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

166 The syntax of early English(68) Fundurinn sem fram hafi fari í Ósló var skemmtilegur.the-meeting that on had gone in Oslo was fun‘The meeting that took place in Oslo was fun.’Sentences like (68) are usually analysed as featuring particle movement, aninstance of the more general operation of Stylistic Fronting (see Maling 1990:82), which occurs in clauses with a subject gap. It has in fact been suggested (seeRoberts 1993: 252–4) that Middle English also has the process of StylisticFronting; an example in which a particle has been fronted might be (69) (notethat (69) is a relative with the passive subject relativized, i.e. it has a subject gap):(69) An hevenyssh perfit creature, That down were sent in scornynge of nature.‘A perfect, heavenly creature, which was sent down to mock nature.’(Chaucer Troilus I 104)It therefore seems possible that preverbal particles in this type of sentence couldundergo movement from a postverbal base position, making these sentencesirrelevant for deciding whether Middle English had underlying OV order inaddition to VO order, and to that extent weakening Pintzuk’s case. It is true thatthe competing-grammars analysis of Pintzuk (1996) has the potential virtue ofunifying the phenomena of preverbal particles and preverbal objects, while amovement analysis of preverbal objects requires additional mechanisms toaccount for preverbal particles (such as Stylistic Fronting and/or the movementprocesses referred to in 5.3.2 for Old English particles). Still, the difficulty offinding unambigous evidence favouring the competing-grammars approach toOV/VO variation in Middle English would make us hesitant to adopt it.Let us try to determine, then, how the idea that all objects are underlyinglypostverbal could be applied to the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century cases ofsurface OV order described in 5.4. The first and simplest type to consider hasthe object adjacent to the lexical verb, as in (56), which we repeat here.(56) alle that him feith berith and obeieth‘all that have faith in him and obey him’ (Chaucer Astrolabe 58)Adopting the ideas on feature-checking set out in 5.3.2., we can posit the followingrelevant stages in the derivation of this sentence:(70) a. [ VPberith feith]b. [ AgrOberith i-AgrO [ VPt ifeith]c. [ AgrOPfeith jberith i-AgrO [ VPt it j]In (70a), the VP has been formed, with the head berith being followed by itscomplement feith. In (70b), AgrO has been inserted in front of the VP, andtogether they form AgrO’; simultaneously, the head of VP, berith, hasadjoined to AgrO. In (70c), finally, the object feith has moved out of VP intothe specifier position of AgrOP, for reasons of case checking. A tree diagramfor that stage would look as in (71).