The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The loss of object–verb word order 169pronominal, could occur in preverbal position in all kinds of clauses. 2 However,as we saw in 5.4, OV order became grammatically restricted in the fifteenthcentury, when it ceased to be productive except where the clause featured anempty subject, or an auxiliary and a negative or quantified object. This impliesthat the status of OV order in the fifteenth century cannot be the same as in thetwo preceding centuries, and a different analysis is therefore needed.For fifteenth-century OV tokens in clauses with an invisible subject, a plausibleanalysis would be one involving topicalization of the object. The relevantparts of sentences (60) and (61) would then have the structures shown in (75),where e stands for the empty subject of the clause IP.(75) a. summe he exiled, summe he put out here rite eyne, and [e worthi man] i[ IPe pursewed t i]b. alle at [is writinge] i[ IPe reden t i]In other words, we would suggest that these are actually instances of preclausalrather than preverbal objects. Support for this idea can be found in thepresence of topicalization in the initial clauses in (75a), where the elementsumme is clearly in preclausal position; this parallel is also found in severalother coordinate sentences with OV order in the final clause. Further supportfor the analysis in (75) can be found in sentences of this type which containan auxiliary: as would be expected on the basis of (75), they have the objectlinearly preceding the auxiliary. Examples are given in (76) and (77).(76) diuers of the seid mysdoers . . . greuously vexe and trobill hem . . . andsumme haue bete and left for ded‘several of the aforesaid miscreants vex and trouble them grievously . . . andsome they have beaten and left for dead’ (Paston Letters 36.46)(77) He slewe his broder Amon that suche desloyaltee and vntrouth had done tohis suster‘He killed his brother Amon, who had done such dishonour and outrage tohis sister’ (Caxton Knight ofTower 87.15)As for the motivation for the movement process represented in (75), it hasoften been suggested that there is a Topic position at the left boundary of theclause. In Rizzi (1997), this idea takes the form of a proposal for a functionalprojection TopP (topic phrase) in this position, which would make it possibleto say that topics move to the specifier of TopP for the purpose of featurechecking.This analysis would then apply to (75).The second type of OV sentence found in the fifteenth century has a negativeor quantified object and an auxiliary. Making use of the by now well-established2Again, we note that the structural trigger of overt movement (i.e. the nature of thestrong features) remains less than clear.