This book describes the historical emergence and spread of the to-infinitive in English. It shows that to + infinitive emerged from a reanalysis of the preposition to plus a deverbal nominalization, which spread first to purpose clauses, then to other non-finite environments. The book challenges the traditional reasoning that infinitives must have been nouns in Old English because they inflected for dative case and can follow prepositions. In fact, as early as Old English, the to-infinitive was established in most of the environments in which it is found today, and its syntactic behaviour clearly shows that it is already a clause rather than a phrase at this early date. Its spread was largely due to competition with finite subjunctive that-clauses, which it gradually replaced. Later chapters consider Middle English developments. The book provides a measured evaluation of the evidence that the infinitive marker to undergoes a period of degrammaticalization. It concludes that the extent to which to gains syntactic freedom in Middle English is due to the fact that speakers began to equate it with the modal verbs, and therefore to treat it syntactically as a modal verb. The rise of to-infinitival Exceptional Case-Marking constructions is a Middle English innovation, triggered by changes in information structure that were in turn caused by the loss of verb-second.

The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English:information structure and syntax in interaction 1 B E T T E L O U L O SRadboud University Nijmegen (Received 13 February 2008; revised 10 December 2008) English syntax used to have a version of the verb-second rule, by which the finite verb moves to second position in main clauses. This rule was lost in Middle English, and this article argues that its loss had serious consequences for the information structure of the clause. In the new, rigid subject-verb-object syntax, the function of preposed constituents changed, and the function of encoding 'old' or 'given' information in a pragmatically neutral way was increasingly reserved for subjects. Pressure from information structure to repair this situation subsequently led to the rise of new passive constructions in order to satisfy the need for more subjects; the change in the informational status of preposed constituents triggered the rise of clefts. If information structure can be compromised by syntactic change in this way, this suggests that it represents a separate linguistic level outside the syntax. IntroductionEver since the work done by the Neogrammarians in the nineteenth century, we know that sound changes may disrupt morphological paradigms, with morphological regularity often being restored by the process known as 'analogy'. An example is the Latin intervocalic -s-> -r-that disrupted the paradigm of the s-stem nouns: the -s remained in nominative honos 'honour' because it was not intervocalic in that position, but changed to -r-in the rest of the paradigm: honoris, honorem, etc. Analogy then intervened by 'regularizing' the nominative honos to honor (Hock 1986: 180). Similar disruption was caused by Verner's Law, where a sound change that was conditioned by syllable stress applied exclusively to some but not to other forms in the verbal paradigm (Verner 1875). Such changes exemplify the relative autonomy of the various linguistic levels: phonological change is 'blind' to the disruption it causes to other levels. Another example is Roberts & Roussou's (2003) hypothesis that syntactic change (more especially grammaticalization) is driven by morphological loss. The situation could be summed up by Lightfoot's dictum: 'grammars practise therapy, not prophylaxis' (Lightfoot 1979: 123).The present article will argue that changes in syntax may similarly disrupt information structure (IS). Its case study will be the loss of verb-second in English, which prompted 'therapy' in early Modern English in the form of new clefts and new passive structures -even to structures that are typologically very marked. The change 1 I would like to thank Anthony Warner and two anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. in the syntax apparently ran its course in spite of the havoc caused at the IS level, which demonstrates that IS and syntax are just as autonomous as the phonology and morphology of the Neogrammarian examples above. Syntax and information structureInformation structure is about...

No abstract

No abstract

Until about the fifteenth century, main clause word order in English was to a large extent subject to the verb-second (V2) constraint; this order was achieved by (i) movement of the finite verb into second position and (ii) topicalization of a constituent from the clause into first position. The loss of V2 syntax led to a change in the function of first constituent adverbial phrases, which had mostly been used as local anchors in Old English, i.e. links to the immediately preceding discourse. In Early Modern English, the system of local anchoring by adverbials was largely lost; links to the previous discourse came to be expressed primarily by the subject. This added to the functional load of the subject, and led to subjects being able to encode a wider range of semantic roles. The emergence of such "permissive” subjects in PDE, then, developed as a response to the loss of V2.