The reanalysis of VO in the history of English

Bastiani, Chiara De

doi:10.1075/cilt.358.05bas

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…The hypothesis that preverbal objects convey given information and postverbal objects new information has been explored for many (West) Germanic language varieties (see e.g. Burridge 1993;Bech 2001;Blom 2002;Coussé 2009;Petrova 2009Petrova , 2012Petrova & Speyer 2011;Taylor & Pintzuk 2012;Walkden 2014;De Bastiani 2019;Struik & Van Kemenade 2020. Understanding the nature of the variation helps to inform the syntactic analysis of a language.…”

Section: Ov/vo Variation In Historical Dutchmentioning

confidence: 99%

When information structure exploits syntax: The relation between the loss of VO and scrambling in Dutch

Struik¹,

Schoenmakers²

2022

J. Ling.

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This paper addresses the relation between two types of word order variation in two stages of Dutch: OV/VO variation in historical Dutch and scrambling in present-day Dutch. Information structural considerations influence both types of word order variation, and we demonstrate by means of a comprehensive corpus study that they have a comparable pattern: given objects tend to appear earlier in the sentence than new objects. We infer from this that the two types of word order variation are diachronically related. Our findings support an analysis of scrambling as object movement from a uniformly head-initial base via the specifier of VP to the specifier of vP. We argue that historical Dutch allows spell out of the object in its postverbal base position, but that this possibility was eventually lost. Consequently, the boundary between the given and new domains shifts from the verb to the adverbial.

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