The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

178 The syntax of early EnglishIt is difficult to say what structure the grammar of the older generationassigned to sentences like (83) and (84). For them, they may have beeninstantiations of overt object movement to Spec,AgrOP, much as shown in(72) and (74), in which case the change which took place around 1400 wouldamount to a structural reanalysis, with instances of overt movement to AgrOPbeing reinterpreted as instances of overt movement to NegP and movement toTopP. But perhaps the sentences had these structures before 1400 too, in whichcase they did not undergo any change, and all that happened was the loss ofthe general option of overt object movement to AgrOP. Deciding betweenthese two possibilities is no simple matter and can only be done on the basisof a full description of the facts of negation and topicalization in fourteenthandfifteenth-century English.What, finally, is our overall assessment of the approach to the changes inEnglish word order based on VO as a uniform underlying order, with movementto preverbal position being due to the need for feature checking? Theapproach has some possible weaknesses, which have to do partly with theoryinternalissues and partly with empirical matters. Thus, the apparent optionalityof overt object movement in (Late) Old English and Middle English maybe problematic. It can be captured within this framework, but only by eithera mechanical application of the notions ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ or a fairly drasticrevision of key concepts of the framework. There is, moreover, as yet no convincingway of linking feature strength to the presence or absence of overt casemorphology. The vital role played by feature checking of the object also meansthat the analysis cannot be straightforwardly used to explain the order ofother elements vis-à-vis the verb. Furthermore, the analysis has nothing to sayabout the rapid increase of surface VO order in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.On the other hand, empirical work by Pintzuk (1991, 1996) and Kroch andTaylor (1994) has made clear that the crucial case of VO order with a lightobject in an embedded clause was neither new nor categorical in early thirteenth-centurytexts: it first arose in Late Old English and did not become categoricaluntil the late fourteenth century. In addition, the potential problemsof the checking approach need to be weighed against some positive strengths.First of all, this approach has the advantage of being rooted in a relativelywell-articulated structural theory of word order. Moreover, it can be appliedto the Old and Middle English evidence on object positions with a fair degreeof success: nearly all the empirical data can be accounted for by the application,overtly or covertly, of object movement into AgrOP. As we have seen, theanalysis also receives support from the fact that the various OV patterns disappeararound the same time, and it suggests possible (though still tentative)