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.

This article investigates the history of so-called permissive subjects in English, for example The tent sleeps four: inanimate, non-agentive subjects used with verbs that normally take animate, agentive subjects. Although permissive subjects are assumed in the literature to be innovations, there is little information available on their use and frequency. Using historical corpora, I provide an account of the history of permissive subjects with five verbs – see, buy, seat, sleep and sell. The results show that permissive subjects with see and buy are already found in the sixteenth century, while those with seat and sell occur from the nineteenth century onwards, and those with sleep first occur in the twentieth century. The five types also differ in other respects, with genre and functional motivations playing an important role. Crucially, there is an increase in the overall use of these permissive subjects, which follows the increase in subject-initial clauses and a more marked use of the presubject position as described by Los & Dreschler (2012), supporting their proposal that several subject-creating strategies – passives, middles and permissive subjects – became more frequent in English due to changes in the pragmatic character of the clause-initial position, in turn caused by the loss of verb second.

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This chapter has fourteen sections: 1. General; 2. History of English Linguistics; 3. Phonetics and Phonology; 4. Morphology; 5. Syntax; 6. Semantics; 7. Lexicography, Lexicology and Lexical Semantics; 8. Onomastics; 9. Dialectology and Sociolinguistics; 10. New Englishes and Creolistics; 11. Second Language Acquisition. 12. English as a Lingua Franca; 13. Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, 14. Stylistics. Sections 1 and 2 are by Viktorija Kostadinova; section 3 is by Marco Wiemann; sections 4 and 5 are by Gea Dreschler and Sune Gregersen; section 6 is by Beáta Gyuris; section 7 is by Ai Zhong; section 8 is by Maggie Scott; section 9 is by Lieselotte Anderwald; section 10 is by Beke Hansen and Sven Leuckert; section 11 is by Tihana Kraš; section 12 is by Shawnea Sum Pok Ting, Ida Parise, and Alessia Cogo; section 13 is by Elisabeth Reber; section 14 is by Furzeen Ahmed.