The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

(81) For to write unnatural things, is the most probable way of pleasing them,who understand not Nature. (Dryden ‘Preface to An Evening’s Love’, 1671)(82) who understand inot [ VPt inature]The loss of object–verb word order 177As Warner (1997) and Lightfoot (1999: 163) point out, it therefore appearsthat V-to-I movement remained possible until some time in the eighteenthcentury. It will be clear that this causes problems for the explanation of loss ofovert object movement given above; we must leave the solution open here.Another question needing to be answered is why, as the general possibilityof OV order disappeared after 1400, two or three surface OV patternsremained possible. Recall that OV order is still found in the fifteenth centuryin cases where the clause contains an auxiliary and a negative or quantifiedobject, or a non-overt subject. We repeat two of the relevant examples here.(61) alle at is writinge reden or heere‘all that will read or hear this writing’ (Sermon 2250)(62) ei schuld no meyhir haue‘they were not allowed to have a mayor’ (Capgrave Cronicles 199.6)What made children acquire a grammar making available OV order in suchcases? The answer, we think, lies in late fourteenth-century children’s drive toassign structures to utterances they were exposed to. These utterances mightinclude sentences like the following, produced by speakers of the older generation:(83) if he do no vengeance of hem that it han disserved‘if he gives no punishment to those that have deserved it’(Chaucer Melibee 1435)(84) they ne kan no conseil hyde‘they can hide no counsel’ (Chaucer Melibee 1193)What did little Lowys make of such sentences when he heard his father utterthem? Since, for some reason, late fourteenth-century children were acquiringa grammar disallowing overt movement of the object to Spec,AgrOP, astructure for (83) and (84) with the object (it, no conseil) being located inSpec,AgrOP was not possible. However, sentences of these specific typescould have a different structure: as proposed in 5.5, sentences like (83) canhave the object in the specifier of the TopP, as is shown in (75), and sentenceslike (83) can have the object in the specifier of the functional projectionNegP, as shown in (78). On the basis of utterances like (83) and (84),children would construct a grammar incorporating these options, whichwould mean that they could produce a very restricted number of surface OVpatterns.