The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

210 The syntax of early EnglishThere seems to be a link with preposition stranding, too. The particle in OldEnglish is found left of the stranded preposition, before the verb; this is stillthe case in Middle English and later, but now it is found after the verb. As wehave shown in (48), the distribution in Middle English differs in one importantrespect at least from the distribution today in that adverbs and/or PPs cancome between the object and the particle. This must find its place in the analysistoo.One aspect of the history of particles has not really changed, and finds amore natural interpretation in a minimalist account. Pronominal objects comebefore the particle right from the Old English period onwards. In an OV analysisfor Old English we can say that personal pronouns cannot be extraposedand therefore are not found to the right of a particle, which, we have argued,marks the (underlying) position of the clause-final verb. The particle no longermarks the verb position in Middle English and the traditional accounts havea particle movement rule, which is blocked by pronouns. A minimalistapproach deals with this differently. There is good evidence that pronouns canbe clitics in Old English and we can assume that the pronoun goes to a higherposition than the particle. A clitic position has been proposed for MiddleEnglish by van der Wurff (1997a) and arguments that pronouns are differentplay a role in analyses for present-day English as well (Haegeman and Guéron1999).6.8 ConclusionIn this chapter we have investigated particleverb combinations inOld and Middle English, and shown that in Old English the particle regularlyprecedes the verb and that, when it does not do so, it marks the position of theverb, with the verb moving through the rule of Verb-Second in main clausesand a V-movement rule in subordinate clauses. In Middle English the particleregularly follows the verb, and we can no longer show a relation between theposition of the particle and the position of the verb. The change in particleposition has been interpreted as a consequence of the change of OV to VO, anapproach no longer possible in a minimalist framework. We have discussedsome of the problems a minimalist analysis faces, which seem considerable,but we have also indicated where it possibly provides better insight.