This chapter provides an overview of the developments in syntax in the history of English. There is a long–term typological drift, with the language moving from synthetic to analytic, with functions that were earlier expressed in the morphology increasingly coming to be expressed by free morphemes. The main word order developments are the loss of Object–Verb orders in Early Middle English, and the loss of V2/V3 word order in the fifteenth century, leading to strict SVO order in which information–structural status was mapped onto syntactic function, with subjects as the only unmarked way to express ‘given’ information and objects as the only unmarked way for ‘new’ information. A number of ‘escape hatches’ develop to compensate for the loss of options for the flow of information in the clause: word order alternations such as the dative alternation or the particle alternation in phrasal verbs, cross-linguistically rare passives, ‘stretched verb’ constructions and clefts.

While Present-Day English has SVO as its canonical word order, word order preferences have undergone substantial changes since Old English times. Not only has word order become more fixed (especially with respect to unmarked sentence-initial elements) in main clauses, but verb-final in subordinate clauses has also been lost. The change from V2 to SVO, in particular, has traditionally been attributed to changes in morphology (particularly the loss of case marking). As word order flexibility in declarative main clauses became more restricted, English developed alternative ways to reorder clause elements for information-structuring purposes, including different kinds of passive construction. This chapter reviews previous research on word order changes in the history of English with a view to showing major developments in the field of English historical syntax, such as the shift from largely qualitative to more quantitative, data-based approaches, a change in focus from canonical to non-canonical word order or from core to more peripheral clause elements. Major theoretical models serve as the backdrop of these developments in the field of English historical syntax.