The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

174 The syntax of early Englishmore main clauses with a fronted verb, and fewer clause-final particles. This evidencefrom E-language would trigger a grammar or I-language allowing postverbalconstituents, and in particular the object, to move to their associatedfunctional projection covertly. At the same time, the language environment thatlearners around 900 were exposed to contained very robust evidence for overtobject movement, in the form of many clauses with an object preceding a nonfrontedverb. The result would be that children acquired a grammar allowingboth options, as sketched in 5.3.2.The textual record suggests that in the late Old English period, sentencesderived from the option of covert object movement, i.e. with VO order,remained relatively infrequent, but within the analysis that we are exploringhere, this may – indeed, must – be taken to be an E-language phenomenon.This is also true of the rise in frequency of VO order in the eleventh andtwelfth centuries, and the differences that there may have been in this respectbetween main and embedded clauses (see Lightfoot 1991: 42–77 for a differentview). The figures of Kroch and Taylor (1994), discussed in 5.4, show thatOV order still occurred in thirty per cent or more of all early thirteenthcentury(embedded) clauses that they examined, a clear sign that the grammarstill made both options available at this time.The grammatical system in which AgrO was not uniformly strong persisteduntil the beginning of the fifteenth century. Throughout this period, objectmovement could take place either overtly (resulting in surface OV order, unlessthe verb moved to a functional projection higher than AgrOP) or non-overtly(resulting in surface VO order). Which option was chosen in any specific situation,and how many instances were produced of either type, is an E-languagephenomenon, and not a strictly grammatical one. Of course, in this case as inothers, the possibilities made available by the grammar (I-language) were notdistributed randomly in actual language use (E-language); rather, speakersand writers would tend to use a particular syntactic variant in particular contextsor situations, for various kinds of reasons.Interestingly, the choice between OV and VO order in Middle English seemsto have depended on the same kinds of factors as have typically been foundto determine linguistic variation in studies of contemporary material. Thus,there appears to have been stylistic differentiation (as between poetic style, inwhich high proportions of OV were used, versus prose style; see MacLeish1969 and Foster and van der Wurff 1995), discourse factors (involving the distinctionbetween given and new information, the latter disfavouring OV; seeFoster and van der Wurff 1997), and perhaps ease of processing of specificclauses (leading to somewhat greater use of OV in clauses lacking an overtsubject; compare Bauer 1995 on a similar constraint in French). In addition,