2.1 Verb-second in Old English

Languages like Dutch and German exhibit different word orders in main and subclauses: subclauses are verb-final, whereas main clauses have the finite verb in second position. With the advent of transformational generative theory, this phenomenon obviously called for an explanation in terms of a transformation – but which order should be taken as underlying, and which as derived? Koster (Reference Koster1975) argued persuasively that the underlying order should be assumed to be the Subject−Object−Verb order of the subclause. Main clause orders can then be derived by two movement rules: one that puts the finite verb into second position, and a second rule that topicalizes a constituent from the clause into first position. This constituent may be moved from any position in the clause, and may have any syntactic function.

Crosslinguistically, main and subclause asymmetries are a common phenomenon: main clauses are affected by various communicative requirements (information structure), the positioning of focus and of discourse-old or discourse-new material, and they therefore tend to develop special constructions not found in the subclause (see Bybee Reference Bybee, Bybee and Noonan2001); the first position of a main clause is a ‘cognitively privileged position’ for which marked topics and marked foci naturally compete (Lambrecht Reference Lambrecht1994: 31–2). Koster's assumption of underlying SOV for Modern Dutch fits the intuitive notion that Germanic was SOV at an earlier stage but developed verb-second in main clauses initially as a response to IS pressures; the motivation behind verb-second may have been at first stylistic, an optional rule to draw attention to the special IS status of the first constituent. The finite verb may possibly have functioned as a focus marker first, as still in Hungarian (Comrie Reference Comrie1989: 63), but must have become entrenched as a syntactic device to mark the modality of the clause (with interrogative or negative in first position) or to regulate the narrative flow (with a narrative adverb, like OE þa ‘then’, or topic, in first position). These two categories can in fact be collapsed into one of ‘clause typing’.Footnote ²

Using Koster's diagnostic tests, van Kemenade (Reference Kemenade1987) demonstrates that OE has a rule of verb-fronting similar to the one exhibited by Modern Dutch and German, but with an important difference. When the first constituent is a wh-word, the negator ne or a member of a restricted group of adverbs, most prominently þa ‘then’, the finite verb (in bold in (2)) will immediately follow in second position, as it does in Modern Dutch or German, with the subject, whether nominal or pronominal (as he in (2)), in the third position:

1. (2)

Footnote ³ However, when the first constituent is not a wh-word, the negator ne or an adverb like þa ‘then’, but a topicalized nominal or prepositional object, or adjunct, like Æfter þysum wordum ‘after these words’ in (3), subject nominals are still in the third position, but pronouns are not: instead they precede the finite verb, which now appears to be in third place (in bold):

1. (3)

Van Kemenade (Reference Kemenade1987) argues that pronouns are clitics in OE and attach to V, which would explain why they show up to the left of the finite verb in (3); (3) would then also be an example of verb-second, with the verb still moving to the same position (identified as C, the head of CP, the highest projection of the clause) even though it appears to be in third place in surface structure. Pintzuk (Reference Pintzuk1991) argues that the verb does not move as high as C in sentences like (3) but to I (the head of IP, the ‘Inflection Phrase’). More recently, data like (2) and (3) have been interpreted as demonstrating the existence of a separate projection for clitic pronouns (van Kemenade Reference Kemenade, Pintzuk, Tsoulas and Warner2000; Haeberli Reference Haeberli, Zwart and Abraham2002), with distinct structural positions for pronoun subjects and full nominal subjects, and two positions for the fronted finite verb. This means that the finite verbs of (2) and (3) are in different positions after all, as argued by Pintzuk (Reference Pintzuk1991): in C in (2) (see the tree structure in (4)), and in the head of a lower functional projection which Haeberli (Reference Haeberli, Zwart and Abraham2002) and Warner (Reference Warner2007) identify as AgrSP in (3) (see the tree structure in (5)). Note that AgrSP and TP now host information that used to be situated in IP in earlier versions of the theory (following the proposal of the Split IP in Pollock Reference Pollock1989).

1. (4)

2. (5)

Full nominal subjects after first constituents other than ‘operators’, as in (6), appear to be positioned in a low position, SpecTP (see the structure in (7), following Warner Reference Warner2007: 88). (An operator is a wh-word, the negator ne or an adverb like þa ‘then’.)

1. (6)

2. (7)

For full nominal subjects following operators, two positions suggest themselves: either SpecAgrSP, the same position as the pronominal subject in (4), or SpecTP, the same position as the full nominal subject after non-operator first constituents. Haeberli (Reference Haeberli, Zwart and Abraham2002) argues that full nominal subjects of both types are in the lower position, with the higher SpecAgrSP position occupied by a null expletive pronoun. This would make SpecAgrSP the position for all pronouns, both overt and null.

It has often been demonstrated that Old English is not consistently verb-second, even if we think of verb-second as shorthand for verb movement to any higher head (whether C or AgrS), regardless of whether the surface result is the second or third place; there are cases in which the verb fails to move at all in main clauses and remains in clause-final position in the main clause (with a very low frequency; see e.g. Koopman Reference Koopman1995) or in the second or subsequent conjuncts of coordinated main clauses (with reasonable frequency; see e.g. Mitchell Reference Mitchell1985: 710ff.). There are also cases in which more than one constituent precedes the finite verb (in cases other than those of (5) with pronominal subjects), with some considerable frequency, as has been noted by Breivik & Swan (Reference Breivik, Swan and Kastovsky1994: 15) and Haeberli (Reference Haeberli, Zwart and Abraham2002). The interpretation of such cases is not easy. Unlike Breivik & Swan, Haeberli manages to tease out cases like (5) as a consistent pattern, as well as possible cases of verb-final; the cases that are left could do with some further analysis. Some instances pattern like the modern West Germanic languages that similarly allow two constituents before the finite verb in special conditions: if the first item is a rhetorical metacomment like a propositional adverbial of the type certainly (cf. the cases with witodlice ‘certainly’ and soþlice ‘truly’ in Breivik & Swan's Reference Breivik, Swan and Kastovsky1994 data), which should probably be analysed as being outside the clause proper (see Hasereyn et al. Reference Haeseryn, Romijn, Geerts, Rooij and van den Toorn1997: 1278 for Dutch). Such clauses, then, should still be analysed as verb-second. Dutch also allows two adverbial phrases before the finite verb under well-studied conditions (Smits Reference Smits2002; see also Auer Reference Auer1996's definition of the pre-frontfield in German), with some frequency, and similar cases in OE and ME should still be analysed as verb-second.Footnote ⁴

There is yet another possible position for the subject in OE, the ‘late subject’ position:

1. (8)

   ‘Father, a eunuch from the King's household has arrived who wants to talk to you.’

   <LS 7 (Euphr) 137>

The subject, an eunuchus of cinges hirede, follows not just the finite verb but the entire verbal string. Late subjects may occur in OE when the verb is passive or unaccusative and can therefore be analysed as objects in the underlying structure which have either failed to move to the subject position (SpecTP) or have done so but have then been postposed to the end of the clause. This construction allows the subjects that are informationally new to appear in the end-focus position (presentational focus). Warner (Reference Warner2007) notes that a sentence like (9) is derivationally ambiguous:

1. (9)

One possible derivation is as in (7) above, with the verb in AgrS and the nominal subject in SpecTP, but because the verb is the unaccusative comen it is also possible that the subject in (9), alle manere of synnes, is a late subject; see Warner (Reference Warner2007) for an extensive discussion. The existence of late subjects further complicates attempts to chart the decline of verb-second in the fifteenth century.

To summarize: XP – Vfinite – Subject clauses in OE and ME cannot all be taken as straightforward instances of verb-second, just as XP – XP – Vfinite clauses cannot all be taken as instances in which the verb has failed to move. Four patterns need to be distinguished when attempting to chart the decline of verb-second:

1. (i) Negation/Wh-word/þa ‘then’–V_finite – Subject, as in (2) and (4). This pattern survives in PE as subject-auxiliary inversion and has been analysed as ‘residual verb-second’ (Haerberli Reference Haeberli, Zwart and Abraham2002: 247); see e.g. (10) below.

2. (ii) XP – V_finite – nominal subject, as in (6)–(7). This pattern does not survive in PE.

3. (iii) XP – pronominal subject – V_finite, as in (3) and (5). Although this order appears to survive in PE, the choice of XP is much restricted in PE, and its function much more circumscribed, as we will see below. The pronominal subject is much lower in PE (it is in the same position as nominal subjects, i.e. the low SpecTP position of the subject in (7)), and the (lexical) verb is much lower too, arguably remaining in its base position; the loss of verb movement for lexical verbs in lME is reflected in the rise of do-support in eModE, and the fact that the lexical verb follows rather than precedes adverbs: John never walks to work.

4. (iv) XP – V_finite – (V_non-finite) – late subject, as in (8). This pattern survives in PE as ‘inversion’; see e.g. (11)–(12).

2.2 The special function of the first constituent in a verb-second system

Haeberli's finding that verb-second did not apply as strictly in OE as it does in the modern West Germanic languages might leave us with the impression that the loss of verb-second was merely a quantitative rather than a qualitative break, with subject-verb inversion gradually ceasing to be a ‘clear majority pattern’ (Haeberli Reference Haeberli, Zwart and Abraham2002: 252). If we think of verb-second in terms of a system that provides a slot in the initial position of the clause for discourse linking independent of the subject, the loss of verb-second entails the loss of this special position and is more than a falling off of frequencies.

The function of the first constituent in the modern West Germanic languages is revealed in a contrastive study by Bohnacker & Rosén (Reference Bohnacker, Rosén, Anderssen and Westergaard2007), who report on the problems encountered by Swedish students in the L2 acquisition of German. As both Swedish and German are verb-second languages, it is not the second position of the finite verb that presents problems; it is the first constituent. The Swedish learners start too many of their German sentences with subjects, including expletives, ‘organizing and structuring information in a way that native German readers find odd and unidiomatic’ (ibid. 31). First constituent frequencies gauged from various studies confirm that the Swedish rate of subjects as the first constituent is higher: 73 per cent compared to 51–54 per cent in Modern German (table 1). Swedish apparently has a stronger tendency than German to have items of low informational value in first position. The first constituent in German is far more versatile and can easily accommodate completely new information, and this accounted for some of the native-speaker judgements. The most significant difference, however, turned out to be use of the first position primarily for discourse reference and text cohesion, with a large proportion (some 30 per cent)Footnote ⁵ of the nonsubject-first constituents (the adverbials in first position) consisting of one of the so-called Pronominaladverbien ‘pronominal adverbs’: adverbs formed by an anaphor like da ‘there’ and a preposition: dazu ‘there-to’, darauf ‘there-on’, daran ‘thereon’, damit ‘there-with’, davon ‘there-of’, darum ‘there-about’, dafür ‘there-for’, danach ‘there-after’(ibid. 49). The preference for deictics is also reflected by high frequency of the temporal adverb dann ‘then’ in first position. German speakers also front objects at a higher rate, and the object pronouns allow very specific reference to earlier entities in the discourse because they are gendered (den, die, das). Bohnacker & Rosén conclude that the morphological complexity of the German pronominal system, including the pronominal adverbs, combines to establish textual cohesion as the primary function of the first constituent – in marked contrast with Swedish, where (at least in the standard variety) the absence of gendered nouns means that specific reference is more difficult to achieve: there is only det ‘that’.

Table 1.

A comparison of rates of subjects versus other first constituents in Modern German, Modern Swedish and OE

A preliminary study of an OE text showed results very similar to Modern German. The text selected was the Joseph in Egypt episode from Genesis (Crawford Reference Crawford1922: 170–203): it is predominantly narrative, and its style is straightforward and unadorned, and so, it was hoped, comparable to the German newspaper corpus and spoken corpus in table 1. The electronic version of this text fragment in the Toronto Corpus contains 255 citations, which broke down into 644 main clauses.Footnote ⁶ After discounting clauses with ellipted subjects, e.g. those preceded by and conjoined to other main clauses with which they shared their subject, and imperatives, subjunctive wishes, wh- or yes/no questions, the remaining 447 declarative clauses yielded rates of subject-first and adverbial-first very similar to the Modern German corpora (table 1). The first constituent functions could be broken down as shown in table 2.

Table 2.

The first constituent in the narrative of Joseph in Egypt (Genesis)

Table 2 demonstrates the prominent function of the first constituent as a position to establish textual cohesion, particularly in the case of the nonsubjects: the adverbials, where deixis is prominent − þa/þonne ‘then’ as temporal adverbs, þær/her ‘there/here’ as spatial adverbs − and the articulate system of demonstratives as the OE equivalent of the German pronominal adverbs − þuruh þæt ‘through that (particular thing)’, be þære ‘by that (person)’, forðam ‘for that’, æfter þam ‘after that’, æfter þisum ‘after this’. Many other adverbial links contain referring demonstratives: on þæs handa ‘in whose hands’, etc. The results of this preliminary study, then, seem to point to the first position as having a function very similar to that outlined by Bohnacker & Rosén for German. Translating such nonsubject textual links, particularly pronominal adverbs, in first position into PE reveals that the presubject position in an XP – S – V – O structure cannot be equated with the first constituent position in the modern West Germanic languages, as we will see below. The contrast with Swedish in this respect demonstrates that verb movement by itself is not a sufficient condition to ensure the functionality of the first position as a discourse link; the system of deictic referencing needs to be sufficiently articulated.Footnote ⁷

2.3 The decline of verb-second

Verb-second starts to decline in the Middle English period, for reasons that are as yet not fully understood. It has been claimed that the presence of inflections on a verb is an important cue in language acquisition that the language in question has verb movement (Roberts Reference Roberts1993; Roberts & Roussou Reference Roberts and Roussou2003) and that the loss of verb-second was triggered by the loss of verbal morphology. Haeberli (Reference Haeberli, Zwart and Abraham2002) argues that the higher SpecAgrSP position, the position reserved for pronouns, was occupied by an empty expletive pronoun when the overt subject was a full nominal; the decline of verb-second would then be due to the loss of empty expletive subjects in general. Lightfoot (Reference Lightfoot1999) argues that certain cues need to be robustly present in the language learner's data to trigger the development of a verb-second grammar, and that these cues fell below a certain threshold due to the dialect contact situation of northern and southern dialects – which ultimately derives from the contact situation with the Old Norse-speaking Viking settlers in the Danelaw area. This contact situation of the ninth and tenth centuries has also been argued to be at the root of the wholesale loss of nominal and verbal inflections in ME, although the evidence about their impact on the English language is indirect: there are no texts from the relevant area and from the relevant period. The first extant texts date from well into the ME period, and filling in such a data gap calls for some well-informed guesswork (e.g. Townend Reference Townend2002) and ingenious use of the material that we do have: northern-Old English glosses of a Latin text. Kroch, Taylor & Ringe (Reference Kroch, Taylor, Ringe, Herring, van Reenen and Schøsler2000) argue on the basis of such glosses that the contact situation with Old Norse may well have affected the verb-second rule more directly, at least in the northern dialects, as Old Norse exhibited a verb-second rule that was different from the OE rule in a number of crucial respects. This may have led to the simplified version of the rule that is evident from these northern glosses.

Smith, in his account of the origins of the Great Vowel Shift in late ME/eModE, emphasizes the importance of the demographic situation in fifteenth-century London as a hotbed for language change: the depopulation after the Black Death of 1349–50, the resulting changes in social structure and population mobility, and the rise of the wool trade, led to massive immigration into London from the north and the midlands. There were sociolinguistic changes as well: from the end of the fourteenth century onwards, French lost its status as language of the nobility (a legacy of the Norman Conquest), which meant that there was now room for an English variety to acquire social prestige and become a social ‘distancer’, the language aspired to by social climbers; the changing social structure now made it possible to fulfil such ambitions. People who change their speech in adulthood for reasons of prestige lack the language-learning capacities of the child and tend to acquire their new ‘lect’ imperfectly, often overshooting their mark (Smith Reference Smith1996). If the northern variety did indeed have a slightly different version of the verb-second rule, the contact situation in London may well have precipitated the demise of the rule. Howell (Reference Howell2006) stresses the importance for the speakers in such a situation of dialect contact to be understood, and argues that the variety that resolves itself as common ground, or ‘standard’, for such speakers will tend to be a compromise that retains features that are common to the contact ‘lects’ and rejects features that are not, especially features that are perceived as typical of a particular lect. Similar observations have been made in the literature on pidgins and creoles, which suggests that the new norm does not simply settle on the lowest common denominator but represents the cumulative result of different speakers' perceptions of what they have in common and what they do not – a marked word order in one lect may be perceived as similar to an unmarked order in another lect (Thomason Reference Thomason2001: 181). SOV languages in contact have been known to give rise to SVO creoles for this reason (Kouwenberg Reference Kouwenberg1992). As a result of all of these factors, language-internal as well as language-external, verb-second declined and the word order of Present-day English, rigidly SVO, emerged.

The decline of verb-second (‘inversion’) presents a diffuse, confusing picture. Jacobsson (Reference Jacobsson1951) and Schmidt (Reference Schmidt1980) report a steep decline from the late fourteenth century onwards, with a short-lived revival in the sixteenth century. Nevalainen (Reference Nevalainen and Fisiak1997), on the other hand, reports a steady decline from 37 per cent in the fifteenth century to well below 10 per cent at the close of the seventeenth century. Bækken's (Reference Bækken1998) extensive corpus research spans the relevant period (1480–1730), but in spite of presenting over two hundred tables of figures, she cannot report any definite trend apart from the fact that verb-second becomes really uncommon only after 1630. All these studies report wildly varying rates of verb-second, within individual periods, individual text types and even individual writers.

Part of the problem, as noted in Fischer et al. (Reference Fischer, van Kemenade, Koopman and van der Wurff2000), van der Wurff (Reference Wurff2001) and Warner (Reference Warner2007), is that some of these studies ignore the theorizing that has been developed about the phenomenon of verb-second in Germanic, which might explain why no systematic patterns emerge. We saw at the end of the previous section that XP – V_finite – Subject clauses cannot all be taken as straightforward instances of verb-second. Pronominal and nominal subjects need to be kept apart, as well as instances of late subjects. By the same token, the nature of the first constituent is important, too; some studies keep interrogatives or negative phrases apart but are unaware of the special behaviour of discourse adverbs like OE þa ‘then’, or eModE then or now, etc., and do not distinguish between these and topicalized constituents – thus missing the important point that the verb fronts to a lower position with topics. Similarly, movement of the lexical verb must be distinguished from movement of auxiliaries; the latter is a purely syntactic phenomenon in Present-day English (PE), triggered by a wh- or negative element in first position, including adverbs such as only ‘not more than’ or rarely ‘not often’ as in (10a) or quantified NPs as in (10b–c):

1. (10)

   1. (a) Rarely did I hear such overtones of gratitude as went into the utterance of this compound noun. (Green 1980, ex. (32e), cited in Birner & Ward Reference Birner and Ward1998: 157)

   2. (b) Many a mile did I walk before I saw a light.

   3. (c) So little time did we have that we had to cut corners.

   (Huddleston & Pullum Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 96)

Then there are instances like PE (11)–(12), which appear to be reflexes of the OE/eME late subject construction we saw exemplified above in (8)–(9); the relevant verbs are given in bold.

1. (11) [Performer] offers to cause the card to penetrate the deck and the handkerchief and come out on the table. But when he lifts the bundle, nothing has happened. He tries again and this time, on top of the folded hanky is seen the imprint of the selected card! (Magic Inc. Trick Catalogue no. 25, p. 71; from Birner & Ward Reference Birner and Ward1998: 157)

2. (12)

   To the left of the altar one of the big wall panels with rounded tops opens, it is a secret door like in a horror movie, and out of it steps Archie Campbell in a black Cassock and white surplice and stole.

   (Updike 1981: 242, from Birner & Ward Reference Birner and Ward1998: 158)

Although the construction illustrated by (11)–(12) is usually referred to as ‘inversion’, it appears to be the reflex of the OE late subject construction we saw in (8)–(9) above. Unlike the subject-auxiliary ‘inversion’ of (10), we have an entire verbal string (a passive) or a non-auxiliary (an unaccusative) preceding the subject, just as in (8)–(9); see e.g. Quirk et al. (Reference Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik1985), Birner & Ward (Reference Birner and Ward1998).

Any ‘late subjects’ like (11) encountered in lME and eModE, the crucial period for the loss of verb-second, should be kept separate and not counted as a possible instance of verb-second; they do not involve verb-movement. Cases with a single lexical, and unaccusative, verb like (12) are even more difficult to deal with because they are derivationally ambiguous (Warner Reference Warner2007; see also Haeberli's (Reference Haeberli, Zwart and Abraham2002: 253–5) discussion of what he labels Type I and Type II inversion in Middle English). They might be instances of late subjects, like (11), but they could also be instances of verb-second if they are the output of a grammar which retains verb-second and which does not yet recognize auxiliaries as a separate category. The crucial period here is the sixteenth century, as is evident from the rise of do-support in this period (Ellegård Reference Ellegård1953).Footnote ⁸ Once auxiliaries emerge as a category separate from lexical verbs, movement to higher positions becomes their exclusive prerogative (as in (10) above); from that point on, lexical verbs stay put in the VP. After the loss of verb-second, instances like (12) can only be analysed as late subjects and not as evidence of verb-movement and reflexes of verb-second. If investigators do not realize this, they might count them as instances of verb-second and conclude that verb-second was alive and kicking when it was in fact in decline. It is the derivational ambiguity of data like (12) that makes charting the decline of verb-second in the lME-eModE period particularly hard; one might conclude that sixteenth-century instances that look like (12) are better left out of the investigation altogether.

Warner (Reference Warner2007) presents a study that does take all these insights into account, and a more systematic picture emerges: his figures show that the late subject construction is stable in the fifteenth century, whereas other types of inversion decline (Warner Reference Warner2007: 103). These are the types Warner labels ‘inversion in final contexts’, where the verb when not inverted would have been clause-final, as in (13), and ‘inversion in internal contexts’, where the finite verb (in uninverted cases) or the subject (in inverted cases) is followed by a complement, as in (14). The relevant verbs are given in bold:

1. (13)

2. (14)

Warner concludes that the subject in these types is probably not ‘late’ but in SpecTP, the normal subject position of PE, which means that the decline of verb-second translates in these instances as a failure of the verb to raise further than T – although the position of nominal subjects is in doubt in this period, as the loss of distinctive positions for pronoun and nominal positions in OE may well have led to nominal subjects being positioned in the high, erstwhile ‘pronominal’, position, SpecAgrSP. Finally, there is evidence from PE that inversion with verbs like speak, say (quotative inversion) or be (presentational inversion) needs to be considered separately, too: although they may derive from the verb-second construction, they appear to have acquired discourse characteristics of their own that set them apart from instances like (11)–(12) (Birner & Ward Reference Birner and Ward1998: 156–7); their inversion pattern was already distinct in lME (Warner Reference Warner2007: 99–100). If quotative and presentational inversion instances are discarded, the data strongly suggest that verb-second was all but defunct by 1500.

Warner concludes that inversion should not be studied as a single phenomenon, as it involves constructions that are formally different, and he recommends that further research should ‘seek to integrate discourse properties into the analysis’ (Reference Warner2007: 107). The role of information structure becomes even more important if we consider how the loss of verb-second restricted the language user's options for positioning given and new information. The eModE period seems to be a crucial stage. We will look at this aspect in the next section.

3.1 The position of the verb

After the loss of verb-second, subjects were apparently restricted to a low position; SpecTP for the canonical order, and a lower, possibly VP-internal, position if we regard Birner & Ward's ‘argument-reversing constructions’ of (11)–(12) as the successor of the ‘late subjects’ of OE and ME. Further rigidification took place when auxiliaries emerged as a separate category in the sixteenth century, and lexical verbs could no longer move to AgrS or C but stayed put in the VP – as is evident from the rise of do-support (Ellegård Reference Ellegård1953), where a form of do moves from I to C instead of the lexical V, and from the position of adverbs. The resulting canonical order of S – V seems to have compromised the ways that were available to the language user to structure information. A similar situation may have obtained in earlier French; Lambrecht (Reference Lambrecht1994) points out that the various types of clefts in French are a response to the demands of information structure in a rigid syntax. In the modern West Germanic verb-second languages, the first constituent provides a separate position for discourse linking; in PE, unmarked discourse linking is a function of the subject rather than the position preceding the subject. Although much more work still remains to be done in this area, we will present some preliminary pointers on these functions. Translation studies (OE/lME/PE and Dutch/PE) show that the loss of verb-second entailed a change in the way in which unmarked and marked discourse links were encoded.

3.2 Preposed objects

Speakers tailor their utterances to what they perceive to be the information state of their hearers. Utterances can typically be divided up into a part that is already familiar to the hearer and a part that is new; the most informative element in the clause is also given phonological prominence (stress). The new information, the focus of the message, is best defined as the value of a variable x in an open proposition; a sentence like (15a), from Birner & Ward (Reference Birner, Ward, Huddleston and Pullum2002: 1370), for instance, can be a possible response to three different questions (15b–d), each one corresponding to a different open proposition:

1. (15)

   1. (a) She bought a bag of rice.

   2. (b) What did Mary buy a bag of? → Mary bought a bag of x.

   3. (c) What did Mary buy? → Mary bought x.

   4. (d) What did Mary do? → She did x.

Note that it is quite possible for x to be an entity mentioned prior in the discourse (‘discourse-old’) but new in the sense of how it is related to the information of the open proposition, i.e. as expressing the value of x; see e.g. Prince (Reference Prince and Cole1981), Lambrecht (Reference Lambrecht1994), Birner & Ward (Reference Birner, Ward, Huddleston and Pullum2002: 1370ff.) for a discussion of these and other facts.

The canonical SVO order of PE has been labelled the ‘pragmatically neutral’ order. In typical cases, the subject will encode old, and the complement new information, but special intonation may put new information in subject position (e.g. Lambrecht Reference Lambrecht1994: 29ff.). This means that SVO order in English is underdetermined with respect to the discourse properties of its constituents, in a way that preposed constituents as in (16) and (17) are not:

1. (16)

   G: Do you watch football?

   E. Yeah. Baseball I like a lot better.   (Birner & Ward Reference Birner and Ward1998: 38)

As Birner & Ward point out, the topic here should not be construed as ‘baseball’ but as the entire category of ‘sports’, and this activation of the entire set explains why the effect is ‘contrastive’. Similarly, in (17), the preposing of material in front of the subject comes with a predetermined interpretation:

1. (17) Did you buy a whole new wardrobe for school? No, I have lots of clothes. Most of my stuff my mom gets _ at Alexander's.   (Birner & Ward Reference Birner, Ward, Huddleston and Pullum2002: 1373)

They point out that the preposing here marks the entire open proposition My mom gets my stuff at x as discourse-old information: the fact that the speaker is still at school makes it likely that their clothes are bought by their mother.

Corpus studies report a decline in the relative frequency of object preposing that starts in ME (e.g. Speyer Reference Speyer, Kepser and Reis2005),Footnote ⁹ and show that its informational function becomes more circumscribed; preposed objects are more often old information (Pérez-Guerra Reference Pérez-Guerra2005: 357ff.). This observation is further corroborated by instances like (18) from earlier English, and their later translations:

1. (18)

Later (lME) translations of the same passage have a cleft, showing that preposed objects were not restricted to discourse-old material before the loss of verb-second (from Ball Reference Ball1991:157):

1. (19) Ful guod weork it was and is: þat heo wurchez in me

   ‘A full good work it was and is that she works in me’

   1280–90 SLeg. (L) 66   (Magdalena)105

3.3 Preposed adverbials

Although PE preposed objects seem to have attracted more attention than other preposed material, there are signs that PE preposed adverbials, too, have a different informational status than clause-initial adverbials in the earlier verb-second grammar. Although an investigation into the information-structural properties of earlier texts necessarily has to remain coarse-grained, general patterns of use do emerge. Corpus studies confirm a decline in the relative frequency of clause-initial adverbials (Breivik & Swan Reference Breivik, Swan and Kastovsky1994). Unlike preposed objects, they show a decline in referentiality in that they tend to encode new information more often in PE than in eModE or lME (Pérez-Guerra Reference Pérez-Guerra2005: 357ff.). The exact nature of the change in informational status still needs to be investigated, but some pointers can be gleaned from contrastive Dutch−English translation studies. Translating verb-second Dutch into the canonical (XP) – S – V structure of PE throws up immediate problems that have to do with information structure rather than syntax. Consider (20) from Hannay & Keizer (Reference Hannay and Keizer1993); the translation given is the one they recommend:

1. (20)

   ‘and that made Bergkamp's tragedy complete’

Note that (20) could have been translated more literally: and with that, Bergkamp's tragedy was complete is syntactically possible (‘grammatical’), but this would not be faithful to the original, as the presubject adverbial is more prominent in the translation than it is in the original text; in Functional Grammar terms, it is an ‘unmarked theme’ in Dutch, but a ‘marked theme’ in English. English clauses only start with nonsubjects when they are informationally marked, i.e. when they represent ‘marked themes’. To convey old information with the same lack of prominence, i.e. as an unmarked theme, English requires a subject (e.g. Downing & Locke Reference Downing and Locke1995 following Halliday Reference Halliday1994 [1985]). A similar instance is (21), again from Hannay & Keizer (Reference Hannay and Keizer1993):

1. (21) Hier heeft Andy Cole zijn eerste hattrick gescoord.

   

   ‘Here, Andy Cole scored his first hat-trick.’

   ‘This is where Andy Cole scored his first hat-trick.’

Although the more literal translation Here, Andy Cole scored his first hat-trick is syntactically possible, Dutch learners are warned against such a direct translation of their verb-second-Topicalized adverbials, especially with adverbials of place; PE employs the preverbal adverbial position to express contrast, as in (22), from university grammar course material:

1. (22) Outdoors, it was very cold. Indoors, it was stiflingly hot.

A recurrent theme in translation handbooks is the advice to convert Dutch nonsubject themes into English subject themes, as is achieved in (21) by resorting to the th/wh-clause (This is where), a pseudo-cleft in which the deictic NP subject replaces the preposed deictic pronominal adverbial (note that daarmee in (20) and hier in (21) are the same type of pronominal adverbs that feature prominently in OE and Modern German, as discussed above in section 2.2). Although this is a popular strategy to deal with first-position adverbials in verb-second source languages, especially with adverbials of place because they seem particularly prone to carry contrastive prominence in the preposed position in PE, it needs to be employed sparingly, as high frequencies of th/wh-clauses may themselves make the translation unidiomatic; PE does not seem to go in for the high frequency of overt linking of one sentence to the next that appears to be typical of the other modern West Germanic languages (see e.g. the contrastive PE/German study in Stutterheim & Carroll Reference Stutterheim and Carroll2005). Overall, presubject adverbials of place and time have an important function in textual organization in English (see e.g. Virtanen Reference Virtanen1992), but not in discourse-linking.

Manner adverbials can be similarly problematic, and may require an Informative-Presupposition it-cleft. The Informative-Presupposition it-cleft marks a proposition as fact rather than as salient shared knowledge, which is where it differs from a stressed-focus cleft (Prince Reference Prince1978). Both types of clefts are lME innovations; Jespersen (Reference Jespersen1937: 86) notes the link between the development of rigid SVOFootnote ¹⁰ and the rise of clefting, and he is echoed by Traugott (Reference Traugott1972). The first clear examples of these types of cleft are in the fifteenth century (see particularly Ball Reference Ball1994). Although the it-cleft builds on existing constructions like the relative clause, it differs pragmatically but also syntactically from these models. Cleft relatives like (23a–b) may mimic ordinary relatives in form, but a closer look reveals that such relative clauses do not modify the N that appears as their head in the usual way, (23a), and may even lack an N-head to modify, (23b); examples from Huddleston & Pullum (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 1046).

1. (23)

   1. (a) It wasn't for me that he made the sacrifice.

   2. (b) It's to avoid such a conflict of interests that I am resigning.

It is only in eModE that we get the first clefts with clausal foci (as in (23b)).

Dutch/English translation contrasts may go some way to explaining the need for such clefts in English after the loss of verb-second. In example (24) it is the second translation, with the cleft, that is the recommended one, not the more literal translation with the adverbial in presubject position:

1. (24)

   ‘With great pleasure, we can inform you that your application has been successful.’

   ‘It is with great pleasure that we can inform you that your application has been successful.’

A possible explanation for the clefted translation of (24) is that the presubject adverbial position in PE would convey greater informational prominence to the adverbial than its status in the original warrants; the function of the Informative-Presupposition it-cleft, then, would be to place with great pleasure in end-focus position to make it less marked, which may sound somewhat of a paradox because clefts are marked structures themselves in the sense that they are not informationally neutral; but nothing else appears to explain the awkwardness of the more literal translation.

3.4 The loss of Contrastive Left Dislocation

The previous section mentioned the th/wh-clause as a translation strategy to avoid positioning an adverbial of place in a prominent position. There is a second verb-second construction that can be translated by such th/wh-clauses, and that is Contrastive Left Dislocation.

Ball's excellent study of the rise of the it-cleft in English compares the clefts found in Watts' PE translation of Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae with earlier translations of the same passages, just to see what structures English employed at an earlier stage, before the existence of the new clefts, especially clefts with a clausal focus, which do not emerge until the seventeenth century (Ball Reference Ball1991: 481). The earlier translations show that OE resorted to correlative constructions and preposing, and ME to a variant of the correlative that is perhaps better analysed as Left Dislocation and preposing; these two constructions can actually be argued to be one and the same construction in a verb-second language, as we will see below. The cleft of the PE translation in (25) shows up as a dislocation in the earlier translation (26), from Chaucer:

1. (25)

   If Nature gives them their beauty, how does it involve you? They would still have been pleasing by themselves, even if separated from your possessions. It isn't because they are part of your wealth that they are precious, but because you thought them precious that you wanted to add them to the sum of your riches.

   (Watts 1969: tr. Bo 2. pr5.67; Ball Reference Ball1991: 482)

2. (26)

   Forwhy fair ne precyous were thei nat for that thei comen among thi rychesses; but for they semeden fair and precyous, therfore thou haddest levere rekne hem among thi rychesses.

   (Chaucer, tr. Bo 2.pr5.108; Ball Reference Ball1991: 482)

Ball (Reference Ball1991: 484–5) explores the various PE options and concludes that it is only the cleft (as in (25)) that will do here; part of the problem is the anaphoric reference between deictic element and the preposed constituent it refers back to, witness the unacceptability of But because they are fair and precious, therefore _iyou wanted to reckon them among your riches. An anaphoric PP, as in But because they are fair and precious, for that reason you wanted to reckon them among your riches, is marginally better, but lacks the specificational reading of the original. Specification can be restored by adding the focusing modifier precisely, which triggers inversion: precisely for that reason did you want to reckon them among your riches, but this is a marked, archaic order. Another option, just as marginal, is a pseudo-cleft with a deictic NP subject, as in But because they are fair and precious, that is why you wanted to reckon them among your riches – in other words, the th/wh-clause that is the translation strategy recommended by Hannay & Keizer (Reference Hannay and Keizer1993) for the pronominal adverbs so typical of the modern West Germanic verb-second languages (see (21) above). Ball's conclusion is that the functions of preposing have changed, and the acceptability of dislocation has declined since Chaucer's time. The dislocation we see in (26) is in fact Contrastive Left Dislocation (CLD), a different phenomenon from Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD), which is the more usual dislocation structure in PE. CLD crucially relies on deictic elements to link the dislocation to the clause. The Dutch examples in (27) illustrate the various possibilities. Note how the translations have to resort to HTLDs, inversions, and the th/wh-clause. The deictic linking elements are given in italics. All examples are taken from de Vries (Reference Vries, Los and Koppen2007), but the bracketing of optional elements is mine:Footnote ¹¹

1. (27)

   1. (a)

      ‘Joop I don't like.’

   2. (b)

      ‘In the garden is where they sat.’

   3. (c)

      ‘It was during the meeting that all hell broke loose.’

   4. (d)

      ‘That he is so sloppy, that's what annoys me.’

De Vries (Reference Vries, Los and Koppen2007) demonstrates that CLD in Dutch shows reconstruction effects (unlike HTLD), which suggests that the dislocated constituent is moved to that dislocated position out of the clause rather than being generated there as in HTLD. This explains why CLD may target any category that can be targeted by (verb-second) Topicalization, which explains why there are no syntactic restrictions at all. HTLD in PE (and Dutch), on the other hand, is far more restricted and targets NPs only; it always involves resumptive pronouns. Note that a second deictic element is optionally present in CLD (as shown by the brackets), which suggests that CLD is in fact the ‘correlative’ construction that is a notable feature of OE syntax. Ball notes that OE often uses a correlative where PE uses a cleft (Ball Reference Ball1991: 483); cf. the structure that we find in the OE translation of Boethius, in a passage very similar to the one in (28):

1. (28)

CLD, then, always involves a deictic element in the verb-second topic position.

CLD is possible in PE; witness (29), from Birner & Ward (Reference Birner, Ward, Huddleston and Pullum2002: 1413):

1. (29) The people who earn millions and pay next to no tax, those are our targets.

They can apparently only be subjects, which is why the translations of nonsubject CLDs as in (25) and (26) have resort to the th/wh-clause or that eModE innovation, the stressed-focus it-cleft. But even as subjects, marked topics are restricted; the independent use of demonstratives has become limited over the centuries to inanimate referents, especially in the singular. Plural those can refer to people, but the same is not true of singular that (see e.g. Huddleston & Pullum Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 1504); witness the unacceptability of the literal translation of the Dutch sentence of (30):

1. (30)

   ‘Do you see that man there across the road? Now there's a man who is wearing a nice suit.’

   ‘Do you see that man there across the road? He's wearing a nice suit.’

The discourse function of the demonstrative die ‘that’ in a sentence like (30) has been described as ‘topic-shift’ (Comrie Reference Comrie, Juge and Moxley2000), indicating that this topic should be identified as the focus of the preceding sentence. The second translation of (30) shows that die can also be translated by a pronoun with contrastive stress, but not by a demonstrative. Example (31), from ca. 1000 (taken from Ball Reference Ball1991: 52), shows se, the masculine nominative singular form of þæt ‘that’, with a discourse function similar to die in (30):

1. (31)

Note that in (31), Ælfric translates the Latin cleft with a syntactically unmarked simple sentence; the demonstrative se ‘that one’ in the high preverbal position is marked enough. Ball notes that the deictic þæt gives way to the pronoun hit in a number of functions in ME (Ball Reference Ball1991:14); the loss of that for animate discourse referents might be related to the loss of grammatical gender on nouns. Nominal gender was lost in early Middle English; those may have been able to keep its function as independent demonstrative for human referents because the plural forms of the demonstrative were common to all genders. Even so, the se paradigm in Old English was far more versatile in its referring functions; examples like (32) abound:

1. (32)

The translation shows that PE requires a more specific link to the preceding discourse.

CLD was rampant in OE (see van Kemenade (forthcoming) for more examples). Van Kemenade demonstrates that the loss of the se-paradigm, and the split into the definite article the and the demonstrative that, both invariant, meant the loss of a type of discourse reference that was both definite and specific; when used as ‘definite determiners’ in a NP, this not only made that NP definite but also gave it a specific reference to a discourse antecedent because of the morphological marking (for gender and number).

The correlative or CLD construction in OE and ME is a versatile construction that allows specificational readings of constituents of all syntactic functions, phrases as well as clauses. As CLD is associated with verb-second topicalization, CLD came to be restricted to subjects only after the loss of verb-second. Discourse linking was further compromised by changes in the demonstrative system and the loss of gender, which is why CLD with a demonstrative in PE is only possible with plural referents. As the functions of the CLD construction are now expressed by it-clefts, the conclusion seems warranted that clefts emerged as a response to the impact of the loss of verb-second on the discourse and IS of English.

3.5 The need for more subjects

In verb-second, a single constituent from anywhere in the clause is placed before the finite verb. This constituent is very versatile with respect to its discourse functions: it may provide marked or unmarked links with the preceding discourse. After verb-second is lost, these discourse functions of the first constituent appear to be allotted to different positions: presubject position, which is pragmatically marked, and subject position, which is pragmatically neutral. It follows that the subject in PE is the only way in which a sentence can link up to the preceding discourse without evoking any special discourse relations and assumptions. As the function of the subject is apparently reserved for unmarked themes, subjects become very important. We find this greater need for subjects reflected in the rise of quite unusual subject strategies in PE, as compared to Dutch and German; PE instances as in (33a) are not possible in Modern Dutch (witness (33c)).

1. (33)

   1. (a) 2004 saw the advent of routers with turbo modes.

   2. (b) In 2004 kwamen de eerste routers met turbo modes op de markt.

   3. (c) *2004 zag de komst van de eerste routers met turbo modes.

      (after www.cnet.com.au/wireless/routers/)

The sheer amount of material translated from English into Dutch and German means that instances like (33c) do occasionally appear in actual texts as the result of too literal translations. Manuals and other advice on translation contain explicit warnings against such practices:

1. (34)

   1. (a) Anti-aging therapies will undoubtedly have to counter many destructive biochemical processes at once. (Original English text)

   2. (b) *Wirksame Therapien müssten allerdings den Kampf gegen viele zerstörerische biochemische prozess gleichzeitig aufnehmen (literal translation; House Reference House2005: 97)

   3. (c) Die therapien der Zukunft müssten allerdings gleichzeitig gegen viel zerstörerische Prozesse eingesetzt werden können (recommended translation; ibid. 98)

      ‘Future therapies will undoubtedly have to be employed to counter many destructive biochemical processes at once.’ (My translation of the recommended translation of (34c))

House points out that ‘future therapies’ are not agentive enough in German to ‘counter’ anything, and recommends a passive. Subjects are also prototypically agentive in PE, but the requirements of syntax and information structure apparently override such considerations, and the result is that PE is much less resistant to having nonagents as subjects of agentive actions.

The prototypical way to create subjects is passivization, and we do indeed find a greater reliance on passives for structuring information after ME (e.g. Halliday Reference Halliday, Lockwood, Fries and Copeland2000). Not only do we see an increase in relative numbers, we also see the rise of passive constructions that were not possible before lME: not only prepositional passives of the type he was well thought of and passivized indirect objects like He was given a book (see also Allen Reference Allen1995), but also specifically passive ECM-constructions. The first tentative instances of these new passives in ME predate the loss of the verb-second system (for ECM see e.g. Warner Reference Warner1982) and do not appear to have an information-structural motivation; but frequencies take off after the fifteenth century, and their motivation in PE is overwhelmingly information-structural (Seoane Reference Seoane, van Kemenade and Los2006; Huddleston & Pullum Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002).

ECM, or Exceptional Case-Marking, constructions as in He believed John to be lying, also known in the literature as ‘Subject-to-Object Raising’ and ‘Accusativus-cum-Infinitivo’ constructions, first appear in Latin-inspired translations in the fourteenth century (e.g. Warner Reference Warner1982) but take off in other registers in late Middle English. One of the peculiarities of the construction is the fact that, from its earliest emergence right up to the present day, it largely occurs in the passive (e.g. Fischer Reference Fischer1989 and the studies cited there for ME, and Fanego Reference Fanego1992 for Shakespearean English), so much so even that some fifty verbs of thinking and declaring only allow the construction in the passive (as in (35a)), not in the active (e.g. (35b)); see Postal (Reference Postal1974):

1. (35)

   1. (a) John was rumoured/said to be lying,

   2. (b) *They rumoured/said John to be lying.

The only verbs that robustly allow the active construction are believe, consider, prove and expect.Footnote ¹² As actives are considered syntactically more basic than passives, which are generally analysed as being derived from actives by a syntactic operation, this phenomenon requires an explanation. A first hint of what might be going on was given by Mair (Reference Mair1990) in a corpus study of infinitives. Noting the predominance of passives in his corpus, he hypothesized that the subject of a passive ECM construction (here given in bold) serves as an unmarked way to connect its clause to the previous one:

1. (36) Thanks to the ubiquitous television set, the best known Canadians in Britain are, quite possibly, Bernard Braden, Hughie Green and Robert McKenzie. Others more talented – Jon Vickers, Lynn Seymour, Mordecai Richler, Sir William Butlin, John Hemming, Oscar Petersen, Garfield Weston, Paul Anka, Glenn Ford, Yvonne de Carlo, Raymond Burr, Donald Sutherland and Christopher Plummer – are probably seldom identified as Canadians. Many of them are generally assumed to be Americans, which raises the whole struggle to maintain a separate identity from her giant neighbour. (Mair Reference Mair1990: 180)

The predominance of passive ECM is in fact the result of the conflicting demands of textual coherence and the rigid word order of Present-day English. The alternatives to (36), listed in (37), will not do, because the link with the preceding text (many of them) is not in its canonical position as unmarked theme – its medial position gives it far greater prominence than is desirable (ibid.):

1. (37)

   1. (a) People generally assume many of them to be Americans.

   2. (b) People generally assume that many of them are Americans.

   3. (c) It is generally assumed that many of them are Americans.

In verb-second languages like Dutch and OE, the constituent before the finite verb may constitute the unmarked theme, and as there are no syntactic or categorial restrictions on the first position it follows that Dutch or OE unmarked themes do not have to be subjects, but can be adverbials, or objects, as we saw in the previous section. Compare the Dutch translations of (36), provided in (38), which unproblematically start off with a nonsubject constituent van deze mensen ‘of these people’:

1. (38)

Considering the construction in this light, i.e. as a solution to the conflicting demands of syntax and information structure created by the loss of verb-second, provides us with an explanation for the predominance of passives without having to resort to ad hoc syntactic constraints like Postal's Derived Object Constraint (Postal Reference Postal1974: 305).