earticle

영어

This paper examines Old English word order from the perspective of the Minimalist Program. It is found that there exist certain similarities between OE and other Indo-European languages based on a cross-linguistic analysis. It then discusses two important problems with respect to OE word order according to Minimalism. The first is the variation of the order between the verb and object, and a uniform underlying unmarked VO order is proposed. As the features of the nominal inflections are strong in OE, they must be checked before the Spell-Out, which forms OV order in phonological derivation after the Spell-Out. The second one is the word order of the subject and verb. The subject of different types occurs in different positions and the position of the verb is the key to explaining OE word order. When the adjuncts are placed in the structure of a fronted verb, there will be non-adjacency of the subject and verb. The analysis demonstrates that when the verb in OE moves into C or lower head X below C, “XP-subject” structure is caused. Finally, the paper briefly investigates three fundamental mechanisms which constrain the change from OV in OE to VO in early modern English.