The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

224 The syntax of early Englishin (16), we now turn to the questions of why Old English did not have thisECM construction and why it developed later in the Middle English period.Some Middle English examples are given in (19).(19) a. Which that he knew in heigh sentence habounde‘Whom he knew to abound in high moral sense’ (Chaucer Monk 2748)b. . . . the weche xx ti marke she hath delyuerd to me in golde for you to haueat your comyng home, for she dare not aventure here money to be broughtvp to London for feere of robbyng for it is seide heere that there goothemany thefys be-twyx this and London . . .‘. . . which 20 marks she has delivered to me in gold for you to have atyour home-coming, for she dare not venture her money to be brought upto London for fear of robbing, for it is said here that many thieves goaround between this place and London . . .’ (Paston Letters 156.7)In the literature, various causal factors for the rise of the ECM constructionhave been proposed and discussed, the main ones being analogy with the AcIafter perception verbs and borrowing from Latin (for details see Fischer1989). Both of these factors seem to have been influential, but we will arguethat the crucial factor was the rigidification of word order discussed above.As noted above, there are two types of evidence to show that the rise of theLatin-type AcI in English became possible only after the word orderchanges, and that borrowing and analogy are the mechanisms by which thechange took place. The first type of evidence is comparative in nature, thesecond involves a detailed investigation of all the constructions that could besaid to be near equivalents (semantically and/or syntactically) of the AcIconstruction.Let us first look at the comparative evidence. If analogy and borrowing inthemselves were the forces that turned the scale for the Latin-type AcI inEnglish, it is hard to see why the AcI did not catch on in sister languages likeDutch and German, which were structurally very similar to Old English, andin which the cultural influence of Latin was as important as it was forEnglish. In addition, borrowing does not explain why the AcI was notalready used more frequently in the Old English period, when Latin hadenormous influence and prestige via Christian writings. The same reasoningwould apply to analogy or analogical extension. If indeed the AcI spread bya type of lexical diffusion from verbs of physical perception to verbs ofmental perception, as Zeitlin (1908) among others suggested, why did thisnot happen already in Old English, and why did it not also happen in Dutchand German? It looks as if, on the level of syntax at least, both analogy andborrowing need to be fed by (changes in) internal structure. In terms of theprocess of language acquisition, the primary data that Old-English-speaking