Preverbal word order in Old English and Old French

Old English (OE) and Old French (OF) are often referred to as verb-second (V2) languages. While it is the case that the verb may appear in second clause position after a non-subject-initial element in both languages, they are dissimilar in a number of features. In this paper, we consider the preverbal elements of OE and OF main clauses in which the subject also precedes the verb. First we give an overview of the word order distribution of the preverbal elements. Then we go on to consider the syntactic implications of the empirical findings, showing that OF is a homogeneous language with true V2 syntax, whereas OE has a much looser syntax. In the last section, we show how the syntax of OE provides a frame within which contextual factors are allowed to play their part in a subtle manner, a possibility OF does not have. We conclude that using the tag ‘V2’ in a comparison of the two languages does more to mask their nature than to reveal it.

[1]  Ann Taylor,et al.  The interaction of syntactic change and information status effects in the change from OV to VO in English , 2011 .

[2]  Eric Haeberli,et al.  Structural variation in Old English root clauses , 2008, Language Variation and Change.

[3]  Svetlana Petrova,et al.  Rhetorical relations and verb placement in the early Germanic languages: A cross-linguistic study , 2008 .

[4]  É. Mathieu.  Stylistic Fronting in Old French , 2006 .

[5]  Barbara S. Vance.  Syntactic Change in Medieval French , 1997 .

[6]  C. Jan-Wouter Zwart,et al.  Morphosyntax of Verb Movement , 1997 .

[7]  Marianne Adams.  From Old French to the theory of pro-drop , 1987 .

[8]  Adam Ledgeway,et al.  Satisfying V2 in early Romance: Merge vs. Move1 , 2008, Journal of Linguistics.

[9]  Ann Taylor,et al.  The Effect of Information Structure on Object Position in Old English: A Pilot Study , 2012 .

[10]  C. Salvesen.  Topics and the left periphery: A comparison of Old French and Modern Germanic , 2013 .

[11]  G. Walkden,et al.  Verb-third in early West Germanic : A comparative perspective , 2013 .

[12]  P. Hirschbühler,et al.  Changes in Clausal Organization and the Position of Clitics in Old French , 2005 .

[13]  W. Koopman.  Verb-final main clauses in Old English prose , 1995 .

[14]  Kristin Bech.  Tracing the Loss of Boundedness in the History of English: The Anaphoric Status of Initial Prepositional Phrases in Old English and Late Middle English , 2014 .

[15]  A. Kemenade,et al.  Syntax and Information Structure , 2012 .

[16]  B. Donaldson.  Initial subordinate clauses in Old French: Syntactic variation and the clausal left periphery , 2012 .

[17]  S. Pintzuk.  Verb seconding in Old English: verb movement to Infl , 1993 .

[18]  L. Rizzi.  The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery , 1997 .

[19]  Bettelou Los,et al.  The loss of local anchoring: From adverbial local anchors to permissive subjects , 2011 .

[20]  Giampaolo Salvi,et al.  La formazione della struttura di frase romanza : ordine delle parole e clitici dal latino alle lingue romanze antiche , 2004 .

[21]  S. Petrova,et al.  Focus movement and focus interpretation in Old English , 2011 .

[22]  Anthony Warner,et al.  Parameters of variation between verb–subject and subject–verb order in late Middle English , 2007, English Language and Linguistics.

[23]  M. Labelle.  Clausal architecture in Early Old French , 2007 .

[24]  Kristin Bech.  Word Order, Information Structure, and Discourse Relations , 2012 .

[25]  Bettelou Los,et al.  The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: information structure and syntax in interaction1 , 2009, English Language and Linguistics.