Old English (OE) exhibits word-order patterns which are reminiscent of the Verb Second (V2) phenomenon found in many modern Germanic languages. Thus, fronting of some constituent often leads to subject-verb inversion, to a word order in which the finite verb occurs in second position. This chapter addresses the question of why V2 was lost in the history of English. It proposes that the loss of V2 in English resulted from the loss of empty expletives and ultimately of a change in the verbal morphology. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 5.2 contains some general observations on the loss of V2 in English. Section 5.3 discusses and rejects two previous explanations of the loss of V2, and develops a new account based on comparative evidence from modern Germanic. Section 5.4 shows how the loss of V2 can be related to change in the verbal morphology of English. Section 5.5 addresses some remaining issues, while Section 5.6 summarizes the chapter.

September 2000). I would like to thank the audiences at theses presentations for their valuable comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are my own responsibility. 1 If no secondary source is cited, the OE data are taken from the "Brooklyn-Geneva-Amsterdam-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English", a syntactically and morphologically annotated version of selected OE prose text samples from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. For more information on this corpus and for the detailed references to the OE texts cf.

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A B S T R A C TA standard observation concerning basic constituent order in Old English (OE) is that the position of finite verbs varies by clause type. In root clauses, the finite verb tends to occur toward the beginning of the clause, and we frequently find Verb Second (V2) order. In contrast, in subordinate clauses, finite verbs generally occur toward the end of the clause, and these clauses are frequently verb-final. We challenge the traditional assumption that verb-final orders and, hence, the occurrence of the finite verb in a head-final structural position are rare in OE root clauses. We present new data demonstrating that the frequency of head-final structure in OE root clauses is much higher than previously acknowledged. We then explore some of the implications of this finding for the general structural analysis of OE.A standard observation concerning basic constituent order in Old English (henceforth OE) is that the position of finite verbs varies by clause type (cf., e.g., Mitchell, 1985;Traugott, 1992;van Kemenade, 1987). In root clauses, the finite verb tends to occur toward the beginning of the clause, and we frequently find Verb Second (V2) order. In contrast, in subordinate clauses, finite verbs generally occur toward the end of the clause, and these clauses are frequently verb-final.In line with these traditional observations, it is generally assumed that verb-final order can occasionally be found in OE root clauses but that it is a marginal phenomenon. For example, Bean (1983) includes the word order patterns SXV (verb in absolute final position) and SXVX (verb separated from the subject but additional material after the verb) in her analysis of the Anglo-Saxon ChronicleWe would like to thank an anonymous Language Variation and Change reviewer and audiences at the