AbstractEven though Old English (OE) has word order properties that are reminiscent of the modern Germanic Verb Second (V2) languages, a wide range of exceptions to V2 can be found. However, clauses with the fronted adverbs þa and þonne (“then”) can be shown to be quite rigidly V2. The main productive exception to V2 occurs in clauses where þa/þonne act as resumptives of a clause-initial adverbial clause. This chapter examines such cases of resumptive V3 and compares them with alternative word orders involving initial adverbial clauses (V2 and nonresumptive V3). Based on detailed quantitative evidence, we show that the initial adverbial clauses are best analyzed as occupying a clause-external position both with resumptive V3 and with V2. With the former, the adjunct clause is followed by true V2, and with the latter, it is followed by a V1 clause. Main clause internal placement of the adverbial clause may however be an option with nonresumptive V3.

AbstractThe history of modals in English has played a prominent role in diachronic generative syntax (cf. Lightfoot 1979 and much subsequent work). There is some consensus that modals underwent a reanalysis at the beginning of the Early Modern English period, which changed their categorial status from lexical to functional. Accounts differ with respect to whether this recategorization involved a radical change from V to T or whether this transition was less abrupt in that modals were already categorially distinct in some way as compared to regular main verbs in the earlier history of English. In this chapter, we examine the diachronic development of the distribution of modals with respect to adverbs with the aim of evaluating these proposals. Furthermore, we show that quantitative data involving modals and adverbs provide new evidence for the dating of the reanalysis of the modals.

Swiss German is a Verb Second (V2) language which displays the verb-final pattern in embedded clauses. In a typical V2 configuration one and only one maximal projection precedes the finite verb. There are, however, violations of this constraint known to exist in Germanic V2 languages. Not only single lexical items, e.g. adverbs like allerdings 'however', but entire adverbial clauses can linearly precede a V2 clause. These violations or non-adherence to V2 are referred to as 'V2 transgression' in this paper rather than 'V3 order', because it is possible for more than one constituent to precede the V2 clause. The intent is to provide a detailed description of this phenomenon in Swiss German, based on naturalistic data from native speakers of a specific dialect spoken in north-eastern Switzerland. These data are compared to naturalistic data from German discussed in the literature.

The verbal syntax of English undergoes substantial changes in the Late Middle and Early Modern English periods. The outcome of these changes is a clear division between main verbs and auxiliaries with respect to their syntactic behaviour. On the basis of quantitative data tracing the diachronic development of the distribution of verbal elements with respect to adverbs, this paper argues that the path towards the present-day system with a separate syntactic class of auxiliaries involved several small-scale steps that can be considered to be of the microand nano-type in Biberauer & Roberts’s (2012; 2016) terminology.

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters address research questions on the relation of syntax to other aspects of grammar and linguistics more generally, including studies on language acquisition, variation and change, and syntactic interfaces. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax ranging from the core verbal domain to higher, propositional domains. This book is complemented by volume II available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/276 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/277.

This chapter examines the nature of the V2 syntax of early English, with an empirical focus on Object Pronoun Fronting. It is claimed that early English, which exhibits both V2 and V3 orders, is similar to a true V2 language like German with respect to XP-fronting: both require one EPP-feature in the CP-domain; and if the presence of an EPP-feature is not motivated by an active interpretive feature, an EPP-feature is inserted and gives rise to Formal Movement (FM). What distinguishes early English from true V2 languages is that in the latter, there cannot be more than one EPP-feature, while in early English, there can be more than one. This difference in the number of EPP-features is related to a difference in verb placement within the CP-domain. Finally, some consequences of this analysis for the diachronic developments in the Middle English period are explored.

This paper considers apokoinus, also called amalgams, in Swiss German that were produced during informal interviews that were recorded and then transcribed as part of a three-year project investigating variation and change in Swiss German. Apokoinus suggest that a speaker has merged two sentences into one, as e.g. in the English example "they used a hover board they call it", in which the last constituent of the first (hover board) is also the first constituent of the second. Apokoinus seem to be a characteristic feature of spoken language, and are found in various languages (see e.g. Meinunger 2011). In our data we found over 200 apokoinus in a sample of 100,000 words, produced by speakers of different ages. Many are of the type illustrated in the title and in "I ha fruener im Sekretariaat han i vil Kontakt gha" (I have formerly in the secretary's office have I much interaction had), i.e. subject-initial followed by an adverbial and a repetition of the verb and the subject. This suggests Verb-Second languages might be conducive to the production of apokoinus. After presenting the data, we discuss why some speakers produce significantly more apokoinus than others.

Whereas object pronouns regularly occurred before the main verb in Old and early Middle English, such word orders were to a large extent lost in Middle English prose by the end of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, some isolated later texts still show regular preverbal occurrences of object pronouns. Such word orders are most frequent with three texts that are translations of French sources. This article closely examines one of these texts, the Middle English prose Brut, and its source, and argues that contact influence is the most plausible explanation for its distinct behaviour with respect to object pronoun placement. It is also shown that the translator does not slavishly follow his source and that the contact effects are mainly of the statistical type in that word orders occurring very marginally in other texts appear with high frequencies in the Brut while such a contrast is not found for a word order that is unattested elsewhere. These observations are compatible with the equally exceptional but slightly different distribution of object pronouns in another translation from French, the Ayenbite of Inwyt. The findings of this article show that translation-induced contact and, possibly, contact in bilingual language use more generally can have important quantitative effects and that these have to be seriously considered in any syntactic analysis of historical texts based on a foreign source text.

Although it is often suggested in the literature on historical syntax that a translated text may be influenced by its source language, there is little work that has examined the nature of this potential interference in detail. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the Middle English prose Brut and an Anglo-Norman version of the same text in order to determine the way in which the Anglo-Norman source text may have influenced the syntax of the Middle English version. The focus is on two syntactic phenomena with respect to which the Middle English Brut differs from other texts from the same period, namely adverb placement and the placement of object pronouns. Whereas in the first case no link to the Anglo-Norman source can be established, the second distinctive property is most plausibly accounted for in terms of language contact. However, the Middle English translator does not slavishly follow the syntax of the source. This is shown most clearly by the fact that he generally avoids an Anglo-Norman word order that can be considered as ungrammatical in late Middle English. The effects of contact are largely of a [...] HAEBERLI, Eric. When English Meets French: a Case Study of Language Contact in Middle English. In: Blochowiak, J. ; Grisot, C. ; Durrleman-Tame, S. & Laenzlinger, C. Papers Dedicated to Jacques Moeschler. Geneva : 2014.

This paper offers an overview of the history of medial NP-adjuncts from Old English to Present-Day English. In Present-Day English, adverbs are perfectly grammatical in a position between the subject and the main verb ('He recently left for London') whereas NP-adjuncts are at best stylistically marked in this position ('(*)He tomorrow leaves for London'). The paper shows that while medial placement of NP-adjuncts has been considerably less frequent as compared to adverbs ever since around 1500, the contrast was initially much stronger in clauses with finite main verbs than in clauses with finite auxiliaries. It is only in the 19th century that medial placement becomes equally marked in both contexts. These developments are accounted for in terms of processing constraints disfavouring the use of medial NP-adjuncts and a structural reanalysis of NP-medial adjuncts in Late Modern English.

Most of the discussions of the loss of verb movement in the history of English have focused on data related to the rise of do-support. In this paper, we extend the empirical basis to evidence from adverb placement. Our analysis of the distribution of finite main verbs with respect to adverbs in a range of prose texts in the history of English shows that the decline of V-movement in English starts in the middle of the 15th century and that verb movement past adverbs is lost to a large extent around the middle of the 16th century. These observations differ considerably from what data involving the sentential negator not indicate. According to that evidence, the loss of verb movement is a rather long process starting in the 16th century and coming to completion over 200 years later. In order to reconcile the conflicting diachronic evidence from adverb placement and the syntax of negation, we propose that the loss of verb movement in English is not a single event but occurs sequentially. In a first phase, verb movement to T is lost while movement to a lower inflectional head is maintained. In a second phase, verb movement starts being lost completely. We show that the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which has been very prominent in accounts of variation with respect to verb movement, cannot capture these developments in a satisfactory way. Instead, it is verbal morphology more generally that will be argued to play a role in connection with the occurrence of verb movement. However, we do not postulate a strong correlation between morphology and syntax and propose that the loss of verb movement in English is the result of a combination of factors: changes in the verbal morphosyntax (loss of subjunctive, rise of periphrastic forms), an acquisitional bias towards simpler structures, the decline of the subject-verb inversion grammar found in early English, and effects of dialect contact.

d Consonance between a:c Internal rhyme within couplets Aicill within couplets Alliteration within the line Nach saor mo spearad 's mo chàil 's mi nam mhàl a' deacadh dàin, no 'm bràigh mi aig liuthad lid', mar chàch a dhruideas nan dàil, 'S duilleach an daraich ri toirm, a bhunait toinnt' leinn 's ar là, tha dhuircean ri dàir nam cheann, 's trom bhilean teannaidh a bhlàth.Are my intellect and taste not free as engrossed I write a song, or am I captive to all its words like everyone under their sway, While the oak rustles its leaves, whose roots are entwined with our day, its seed breeds in my mind, and on my lips it turns to bloom.

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Although it is often suggested in the literature on historical syntax that a translated text may be influenced by its source language, there is little work that has examined the nature of this potential interference in detail. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the Middle English prose Brut and an Anglo-Norman version of the same text in order to determine the way in which the Anglo-Norman source text may have influenced the syntax of the Middle English version. The focus is on two syntactic phenomena with respect to which the Middle English Brut differs from other texts from the same period, namely adverb placement and the placement of object pronouns. Whereas in the first case no link to the Anglo-Norman source can be established, the second distinctive property is most plausibly accounted for in terms of language contact. However, the Middle English translator does not slavishly follow the syntax of the source. This is shown most clearly by the fact that he generally avoids an Anglo-Norman word order that can be considered as ungrammatical in late Middle English. The effects of contact are largely of a quantitative nature. Word orders that are only marginally present in other late Middle English texts occur with high frequencies in the Middle English Brut. These findings confirm that translation effects must be seriously considered as a potential source of interference at least in quantitative diachronic studies.

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