The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

172 The syntax of early Englishdata in fact instantiate overt checking of a topic feature and a negative feature.A further question raised by the data is why, around 1400, OV order ceased tobe productive in most contexts and survived in the few contexts that it did.This brings us to issues of diachrony, which is the topic of the next section.5.6 The diachrony of OV and VO orderIt may be good to begin this section by emphasizing once again a particularaspect of the history of OV/VO order in English that has beenneglected in earlier research, which commonly states that the shift took placein the twelfth century and then quickly moves on to the question of whatfactors brought it about. On the basis of the empirical material presented in5.2 and 5.4, it is clear that the change-over from surface OV to VO is slowerand more gradual than such an account implies; it is true that surface VOorder gained a lot of ground during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but italready had a firm foothold before that time, and it took several more centuriesbefore surface OV order as a productive option disappeared from prose writings.The data presented in 5.4 show that it is not until 1400 that there is a discontinuityin terms of the types of syntactic contexts allowing OV order, withmost contexts losing this option but two or three contexts retaining it until1650. It is discontinuities like these that are the clearest signs of grammaticalchange, and below we try to interpret them from the perspective of the Kaynestyleapproach to word order variation developed in 5.3 and 5.5.Before we consider the situation in Middle English, let us first look at the OldEnglish facts from a diachronic point of view. As we saw in 5.3.1.1, Pintzukand Kroch (1989) argue that the language of Beowulf has consistent surface OVin cases where the verb has not been fronted, with only heavy objects occurringpostverbally. From the perspective of the analysis developed in 5.3.2, it mighttherefore be possible to say that the case features of AgrO were uniformlystrong at this stage of the language, forcing overt movement of the object tothe specifier of AgrOP, and hence consistent surface OV order (though we notethat this leaves the position of heavy objects unexplained). In the stage of thelanguage represented by the prose texts, objects are still frequently preverbal,but light postverbal objects are also common. We have argued in 5.3.2 that thiscould be interpreted as a sign that the case features were not uniformly strong,making both overt and non-overt object movement possible (an idea that initself raises some thorny questions for the approach as a whole, as we noted).To the extent that Beowulf indeed represents an earlier stage of Old English,we can therefore identify a historical change, taking place at some point in