The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The loss of object–verb word order 171(79)IPSpec.I'yejIVPhaueQPVPeny thyngiSpecV'tj V tispokenThis analysis commits us to the view that quantifier raising may take placeovertly, which is not a standard assumption. However, there are some facts inModern French which are similar to our fifteenth-century English data andfor these, Belletti (1990) and Cinque (1995: 276–86) have also invoked an overtprocess of quantifier movement. An example is given in (80).(80) Je ne peux pas tout faire.I NEG can NEG everything do‘I can’t do everything.’To conclude this section, let us evaluate what we have done. Our attempt toanalyse the Middle English data from the perspective of a Kayne-styleapproach to word order has brought to light a certain degree of continuity inthe order of object and verb and the mechanisms responsible for it during theOld and Middle English periods until about 1400. Before that time, OV orderappears to be a productive process, found in a range of syntactic contexts, allof which can be made to follow from a feature-checking account withoutraising insuperable difficulties. However, as we noted for Old English in 5.3.2,the position of other elements, such as PPs and particles, may be more difficultto account for, and it is not surprising to see that these still stand out asproblem areas when it comes to deciding between the feature-checkingapproach and the alternative competing-grammars approach of Pintzuk(1996).For the post-1400 data, an approach incorporating the idea of featurechecking also offers a reasonable analysis, although the data are sharply differentfrom the pre-1400 data in showing OV order in only two or three veryspecific syntactic contexts. As we suggested above, the fifteenth-century OV