volume: 5 (2002)
pages: 49–56
author: Judit Górász
title: Objects and adverbials and the loss of OV order in English
abstract: One of the most interesting phenomena in the documented history of the English language is the systematic change that transformed it from an inflecting V2 language with OV as its basic word order into the strictly SVO, isolating language of the present. The relevant syntactic and morphological changes (i.e., the changes in word order and the weakening of the inflection system) are clearly not independent of each other, though the problem of their exact relationship raises numerous questions. The focus of the present paper is the change from OV to VO order, which took place simultaneously – to some extent – with the transition from the Old English to the Middle English period. Still, it did not happen overnight, in fact, it seems to have been a gradual change that took several hundred years before it was completed. This means that for quite a long period, a significant number of OV and VO sentences occurred simultaneously, until at some point in the Middle English period, OV became restricted to a few, narrowly defined linguistic contexts.
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