The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Verb–particles in Old and Middle English 209sometimes reanalysed as a prefixed verb, possibly earlier with up, as examplesof this often involve transitive verbs. The presence of an object after the verbwould be an important signal of VO word order.It may be interesting to note that such reanalysed prefixed verbs could beused until very recently and some can apparently still be used today. The OEDrecords instances of the verb ‘to uprise’ until late in the nineteenth century.Joseph Conrad, though a foreigner by birth, used such prefixed verbs regularly:(49) The spires of churches, numerous, scattered haphazard, uprose like beaconson a maze of shoals without a channel. (Conrad Lord Jim 1949: 254)6.7.2.2 Universal base hypothesisSo far no detailed minimalist analyses have been worked out for eitherthe Old English or the Middle English particle facts. We have seen that particlesin Old English behave syntactically much like Dutch separable prefixes,but it remains to be investigated whether the analyses proposed for Dutchwork for Old English too. In this section we will sketch some of the problemsa minimalist analysis for Middle English faces and outline what points mayhave to be considered in developing a coherent and insightful account.Within the framework developed by Kayne (1994), the Middle English evidenceshows that there has been a change in whatever it is that triggers themovement of the particle in Old English to a position left of the finite verb. Ifwe assume that particles are secondary predicates in Old English, and that anaccount as proposed for Dutch by Zwart (1993) is feasible for Old English, inwhich overt movement is necessary for feature checking, we must concludethat overt movement is no longer necessary in Middle English. It is notimmediately obvious what the motivation for the change could have been. Onething that may be noted though, is that we can derive the Middle English wordorders on the same analyses as those independently needed to derive MiddleEnglish OV and VO word orders, as we saw in chapter 5, and this should certainlybe considered as support for the universal base hypothesis.An account for Middle English will have to consider that particles beforethe verb characteristically occur in OV structures and that V-movement toAgrO is not lost before the end of the Middle English period. Chomsky (1993:18) states that overt movement of the verb to AgrO is a necessary step in derivingOV word order. Without it the object cannot move overtly (see chapter 5),nor, it seems, can the small clause containing the particle. If this dating iscorrect, and if the order V–NP–Part reflects stranding of the particle by V-movement, this may be taken to suggest that the V–NP–Part word orders frozeinto idioms before the point in time when overt checking in AgrO was lost.