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In:Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade
Edited by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 243] 2017
► pp. 9–34

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Chapter 2
From OV to VO in English

How to Kroch the nut

 | Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.02hin
Abstract
The paper addresses word order change in the history of English and proposes a novel account arguing that an intricate combination of two factors led to the pertinent changes. In particular, I will address the data and generalisations in Kroch and Taylor (2000) and outline a scenario that may be seen as a first step towards cracking the nut posed by them. To this end, I argue that the grammaticalization of the definite determiner at the end of the Old English (OE) period in combination with the loss of Case in early Middle English (eME) destroyed the balances in a system in which mixed word orders were determined by information structural and prosodic conditions and led to a reanalysis in the interface between syntax, prosody and information structure.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Word order variation in OE
    • 2.1The effect of information structure
    • 2.2The effect of grammatical weight
    • 2.3The interpretation of these effects
  • 3.On the complex interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure
    • 3.1The weight condition as a prosodic condition
    • 3.2The mapping between syntactic structure and prosodic structure
    • 3.3Focus, prominence and rules of accent placement
    • 3.4The interpretation of OE word order variation in the interface approach
  • 4.Word order change in the history of English
    • 4.1The effect of the grammaticalization of the definite determiner on word order
    • 4.2 The effect of the loss of case on word order
    • 4.3Word order variation in eME
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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