The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The loss of object–verb word order 175there was social or dialectal differentiation, in particular correlating withEnglish versus Scandinavian ethnicity, the latter showing greater use of surfaceVO (see Danchev 1991, Weerman 1993 and, more tentatively thoughwith better empirical support, Kroch and Taylor 1994).But around 1400, a qualitative change can be observed in the textual record,from which we can deduce a change in the underlying grammar. The occurrenceof OV order becomes limited to just a few syntactic patterns, specificallyclauses with an invisible subject and clauses containing an auxiliary and a negativeor quantified object. This means that children born around 1400acquired a grammar that no longer made sentences with surface OV orderavailable, except in the contexts just specified, while children born one generationearlier had still acquired a grammar yielding OV order in all kinds of syntacticcontexts. Within the feature-checking approach to OV/VO order, therelevant change can be interpreted as the loss of the option of overt objectmovement to the functional projection AgrOP. Note that this interpretationof the change as a unified phenomenon receives support from the fact that,apart from the exceptions mentioned above, all other OV contexts seem to belost simultaneously around 1400: the change affects not only cases of OV withthe object adjacent to the lexical verb, but also cases where the object precedesan adverbial or an auxiliary. In 5.4, we argued that the existing variety of OVpatterns in the thirteenth and fourteenth century could receive a unified analysiswithin a feature-checking approach, while this might be difficult inPintzuk’s (1991) competing-grammars approach. The fact that all variantsseem to disappear at the same time is a further argument supporting our position.We now have to ask the question: what difference in the language environmentaround 1400 was responsible for children no longer acquiring the optionof overt object movement? We shall indicate here the general directions inwhich we think an answer may be sought. One factor that comes to mind isthe dwindling frequency of surface OV tokens discussed in 5.4. If childrenaround 1400 were exposed to so few data necessitating the assumption of overtobject movement, they may not have acquired it through lack of robust evidencefor it in the primary data. While this scenario is certainly possible, itamounts to saying that OV order disappeared because it became infrequent.Clearly, we then still have to explain why the evidence for OV order (i.e. thedata triggering overt object movement) fell below a threshold of robustness.Since we argued above that the frequency of OV and VO order in the period900–1400 is an E-language phenomenon, the eventual explanation will haveto address matters of language use, in particular the factors determining thechoice between the two possible word orders in the fourteenth century.