As I write this piece, I am well into my final year as editor. Just as American presidents nearing the end of their term typically seem to develop an interest in their legacy, I confess that I have harbored similar thoughts about my own tenure at the helm of this journal. I trust that Language readers will forgive me for any excess in this regard as I begin to reflect in print here on my term.

This article looks at a hitherto unnoticed series of parallels between Middle English (ME) and Medieval Spanish (MS). In the first place, while both appear to have been essentially VO languages, they allow identical classes of object to move leftward over the verb. In ME, movement is normally to a position between the auxiliary and the main verb, whereas in MS the movement is normally to the left of the auxiliary, if one is present. Second, both languages allowed the fronting of nonfinite verb forms. We argue that the parallels in question are the result of analogous processes of reanalysis operating in the two languages at earlier periods in their history. Both MS and ME descend from languages that tended toward O-V(-Aux) order. According to our analysis, when the structural mechanism giving rise to the latter order was lost, certain instances of OV ordering were nevertheless able to survive in reanalyzed form. The ‘low’ pattern of reanalysis in ME versus the ‘high’ pattern observable in MS can then be attributed to the blocking effect of the subject in Spec-TP in English and its absence in the Spanish case (where the subject is either null or not in spec-TP). As regards nonfinite fronting, this too can be regarded as a relic of the older word order. For MS we posit an analogous reanalysis to that observed for relic OV ordering, whereas for ME the evidence points toward an undisturbed continuation of the earlier V-Aux pattern. This difference between MS and ME can again be attributed to the absence versus presence of a spec-TP subject.

Quatrains in English folk verse are governed by laws that regulate the patterns of truncation (nonfilling of metrical positions) at the ends of lines. Each truncation pattern (we claim 26) is adhered to consistently through multiple stanzas and defines a verse type. Our descriptive goal is to account for why these and only these truncation patterns exist. Our crucial hypothesis is that the function of truncated lines is to render SALIENT certain layers in the natural constituency of the quatrain: the line, the couplet, or the quatrain as a whole. All three cannot be rendered salient at once, so the saliency constraints conflict. Each saliency constraint also conflicts with metrical constraints, which require that metrical positions be filled with appropriate syllables and stresses. The twenty-six well-formed quatrain types each represent a particular prioritization of the conflicting constraints.

We formalize this in optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993): the inventory of types is derived as the factorial typology of our constraint set; namely, the set of outputs of all grammars obtained by freely ranking the violable constraints. We also account for differing text frequencies in our data corpus by assigning each constraint a range of possible strengths, and from this develop an optimality-theoretic account of gradient well-formedness judgments.