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Article published In: Linguistic Variation
Vol. 23:2 (2023) ► pp.343–378

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VO or OV

V to v or not to v

 | Meertens InstituteAmsterdam
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Meertens Institute.

Published online: 28 November 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.22005.bro
Abstract
This article sketches a new analysis of the diachronic development found in many West Germanic languages from a hybrid VO-OV order to a rigid OV or VO order. The discussion departs from the discussions in Struik & Van Kemenade (Struik, Tara & Ans Van Kemenade. 2020. On the givenness of OV word order: A (re)examination of OV/VO variation in Old English. English Language and Linguistics 241: 1–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar/Struik, Tara & Ans van Kemenade. 2022. Information structure and OV word order in Old and Middle English: a phase-based approach. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 251: 79–114. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and Struik, Tara & Gert-Jan Schoenmakers. to appear. When information structure exploits syntax: the relation between the loss of VO and scrambling in Dutch. Journal of Linguistics. on the diachronic development of English/Dutch, which focus on the role of object shift and information structure. My interpretation of their data will be based on an earlier analysis of the Germanic OV and VO languages in Broekhuis (. 2008. Derivations and evaluations: object shift in the Germanic languages. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: § 2.4; . 2011. A typology of clause structure. In Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2010, eds. Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and Johan Rooryck, 1–31. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The main conclusions are the following. First, the change from the historical hybrid VO-OV systems to the rigid OV and VO systems of the present-day languages is due to changing the “setting” [±V‑to‑v] to the more categorical ones [−V-to-v] or [+V-to-v]. Second, the role of object shift in the diachronic development is modest; it is not involved in the development of the OV-languages at all and involves only the (partial) loss of object shift in the VO-languages (contra Struik et al.). Third, the encoding of the information-structural new-given distinction remains constant in that the interpretation of (un)scrambled nominal objects does not change over time (contra Struik & Schoenmakers).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background assumptions of the two competing analyses
  • 3.The codification of new/given objects in the history of Germanic
    • 3.1The derivation-and-evaluation framework
    • 3.2Information structure: Leftward object shift without V-to-v
    • 3.3Information structure: Leftward object shift plus V-to-v
    • 3.4Conclusion
  • 4.The VO-OV alternation in (historical) West Germanic
    • 4.1Competing grammars in the D&E framework
    • 4.2Degrees of VO/OV-ishness
    • 4.3Transition from the hybrid to a rigid VO/OV systems
    • 4.4Conclusion
  • 5.The placement of new definite objects in OV languages
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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