A construction very widely used in Old English and Old Germanic more broadly are correlatives introduced by an adverbial or conditional subclause, as in When you've done your homework, (then) you can come back (Old English: ‘…, then can you come back’). Correlatives originate from a paratactic clause structure, making use of resumptive adverbs such as then belonging to the Old Germanic series of demonstrative adverbs, whose syntactic niche was the clause-initial position, particularly in Verb Second main clauses. Paratactic structure in correlatives is diagnosed by the presence of a resumptive adverb. We show that the correlative use of resumptive adverbs is sensitive to both clause-internal and clause-external variables: mood, subclause-internal particles, negation, subject type, subclause weight, text type, translation. Correlatives decline from late Old English onward. Although it may seem tempting to attribute this to the loss of Verb Second in English, it resulted primarily from the loss of the original Germanic resumptive adverbs.

This article presents a case study on the shifting interaction between clause structure, information structure and discourse organisation in the history of English, as evidenced by the development from Old to Middle English of what we will call discourse particles: discourse-cohesive devices grammaticalised from adverbs. These include the Old English elements þa, þonne, nu, when used in a clause-internal position.We will show that these discourse particles have the following properties: 1) pragmatically: they express the response of the speaker to the context/common ground shared by speaker and hearer, and thus play a pivotal role in common ground management; 2) relation to clause type: the pragmatic meanings of discourse particles are co-determined by the illocutionary force of the clause types in which they occur, including main clause questions, imperatives, hwaet exclamatives, and correlative subclauses; 3) syntactically and information structurally: discourse particles occur in a fixed position in the clause that separates discourse-given from discourse-new information. Discourse particles thus form a subtle lynchpin between pragmatics, discourse management and clause structure.Some particles were lost in the transition to Middle English, but then and now continued to be attested in questions and imperatives, in the same clause-internal position as in OE. Towards the end of the ME period, we see a positional shift to clause-final position, though maintaining the discourse linking character of the particle. This change is due to a syntactic change tightening the use of strict SVO word order and narrowing the use of clause-medial material.

This article traces the diachronic development of English conditionals with clause-initial subclauses (If you hurt the cat, (then) she will bite you) by means of (frequency) data from three corpora (YCOE, PPCME2 and PPCEME). It investigates the division of labour between (g)if, and (meaning ‘if, suppose/provided that, on condition that’) and verb-initial conditionals from Old to Early Modern English. It is shown that conjunctional conditionals (e.g. if conditionals) have always been most frequent. The limitations on verb-initial conditionals (as they exist in Present-day English) develop diachronically and are related to restrictions on verb movement and choice of verb, and not frequency. Genre preferences, however, seem to exist. The use of then introducing the main clause will be shown to be a reflex of an earlier paratactic structure. Its use over time is influenced by mood and length, the latter being of influence especially in later periods.