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This chapter examines the possible effects of case-marking on constituent order in Old English, and demonstrates that overt morphology does not play any role in determining verb-object order. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 16.2 discusses variation, optionality, and the concept of grammatical competition. Section 16.3 describes the case-marking system of Old English and shows that the language exhibits some of the well-known syntactic effects of morphological case. Section 16.4 shows that neither overt case-marking nor case ambiguity has any effect on verb-object order. Section 16.5 demonstrates that an analysis involving feature strength and leftward movement for case-checking is equivalent to grammatical competition, with no relationship to overt morphology. Section 16.6 provides distributional evidence for grammatical competition.

Although it has generally been recognized that Old English was a verb-final language with verb-seconding, the existence of clauses with main verb complements and adjuncts appearing after the otherwise clause-final verb seems to contradict the hypothesis that the language was strictly verb-final in underlying structure. There are three possible analyses to explain these clauses: variable word order in the base, leftward verb movement, and rightward movement of NPs and PPs. In this article, we demonstrate that only the third analysis adequately explains the data of the Early Old English poem Beowulf. Moreover, by investigating the mapping between syntactic structures and metrical units, we provide evidence for two types of rightward movement with two distinct structures: heavy NP shift, with a characteristic major intonational boundary between the main verb and the postposed NP, and PP extraposition, where the intonational boundary was much less common.