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Revisiting the loss of verb movement in the history of English

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Abstract

Most of the discussions of the loss of verb movement in the history of English have focused on data related to the rise of do-support. In this paper, we extend the empirical basis to evidence from adverb placement. Our analysis of the distribution of finite main verbs with respect to adverbs in a range of prose texts in the history of English shows that the decline of V-movement in English starts in the middle of the 15th century and that verb movement past adverbs is lost to a large extent around the middle of the 16th century. These observations differ considerably from what data involving the sentential negator not indicate. According to that evidence, the loss of verb movement is a rather long process starting in the 16th century and coming to completion over 200 years later. In order to reconcile the conflicting diachronic evidence from adverb placement and the syntax of negation, we propose that the loss of verb movement in English is not a single event but occurs sequentially. In a first phase, verb movement to T is lost while movement to a lower inflectional head is maintained. In a second phase, verb movement starts being lost completely. We show that the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which has been very prominent in accounts of variation with respect to verb movement, cannot capture these developments in a satisfactory way. Instead, it is verbal morphology more generally that will be argued to play a role in connection with the occurrence of verb movement. However, we do not postulate a strong correlation between morphology and syntax and propose that the loss of verb movement in English is the result of a combination of factors: changes in the verbal morphosyntax (loss of subjunctive, rise of periphrastic forms), an acquisitional bias towards simpler structures, the decline of the subject-verb inversion grammar found in early English, and effects of dialect contact.

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Notes

  1. As the label of the landing site of a verb varies across different analyses (I, T, Agr etc.), we use the neutral term V-movement. Here, we will generally restrict its use to phenomena involving movement to the inflectional domain only. But cf. our discussion of Old English in Sect. 2.2 on the possible relevance of the CP-domain in early English.

  2. All data in this paper are based on the following parsed historical prose corpora of English: The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003), the Penn Corpora of Historical English (Kroch and Taylor 2000; Kroch et al. 2004, 2010) and The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Taylor et al. 2006). We follow the referencing conventions used in these corpora.

  3. It should be stressed, however, that, since AdvPs consisting of more than an adverb are considerably less common than one-word AdvPs in our corpora, the inclusion of larger AdvPs would not have altered our main findings in any substantial way.

  4. For simplicity’s sake, we will adopt structures here that, by referring to head-final projections, are not in line with Kayne (1994). We do not think that this has any substantial bearing on the main points discussed here. Furthermore, for the periods that will be crucial for the loss of V-movement, directionality does not play a role any more, as English is clearly head-initial by then (cf. Sect. 3).

  5. Alternative labels for Vf2 can be found in the literature. The main advantage of identifying Vf2 as Fin and using a rich CP structure is not only that it provides a simple account of the absence of embedded subject-verb inversion (and, as we will see below, for the clause type asymmetry with respect to verb-final order), but it can also account for the occurrence of elements other than the subject in the domain to the left of Vf2 in (8) (as for example in the frequent orders of the type ‘Subject – object pronoun – verb – …’). Furthermore, the apparent discourse sensitivity of the higher subject position could be captured by relating it to a CP-projection hosting discourse-given entities. See Walkden (2014:79ff.) for further discussion of these issues.

  6. We will also leave open the exact positions of initial non-subject constituents and of the SU1 position in (7) within a split CP framework. See Walkden (2014:87ff.) for some observations.

  7. As for complements of bridge verbs, they allow subject-verb inversion of the type that targets Vf2 (Fischer et al. 2000:115f.). This suggests that the complementizer is directly inserted in a higher position in the CP-domain already (e.g. C in (8)).

  8. Some further support for this conclusion comes from negative clauses involving a secondary negator. Although such clauses are not very frequent yet in OE as sentential negation is most commonly expressed through the negative verbal proclitic ne alone, some examples that are relevant for our purposes can nevertheless be identified. One of them is shown in (i).

    1. (i)
      figure i

    There is no evidence that secondary negators can be right-adjoined at any point in the history of English. Hence, the fact that na intervenes between the finite verb and its complement in (i) shows that the verb has undergone leftward movement out of the VP past negation in these examples.

  9. The difference between main and subordinate clauses is not statistically significant (main clauses: 205 SVAdv vs. 84 SAdvV (29.1 %); subordinate clauses: 41 SVAdv vs. 15 SAdvV (26.8 %); p = 0.73).

  10. However, the difference between the overall frequencies of SAdvV order (58.1 % for main clauses, 84.8 % for subordinate clauses) and the frequencies of SAdvV in clearly head-initial clauses (29.1 % and 26.8 %) suggests that a very large number of SAdvV orders must nevertheless be the result of head-final structure.

  11. Concerning the position of the finite verb, an alternative would be that OE already had word orders lacking movement of the verb out of the VP. However, examples like that in (i) below, which involves two adverbs, suggest that the verb does not remain in its base position in clauses with SAdvV order.

    1. (i)
      figure l

    In (i), an adverb intervenes not only between the subject and the verb, but also between the verb and the object. The latter fact suggests that the verb has left its base position.

  12. In the Middle and Early Modern English examples, the reference to the source is followed by the date of the text.

  13. As was the case for the OE examples in (9a) to (9c), multiple extraposition of the elements to the right of the finite verb would be a possible but unattractive analysis for the cases in (12). Such an analysis can be excluded for (13), however, since there is no evidence (e.g. from clauses with a finite auxiliary and a non-finite main verb) that secondary negators can be extraposed at any point in the history of English.

  14. Besides SAdvV, we can also find SnotV order in early ME. However, SnotV has been argued to be the result of residual head-final structure only (cf. Haeberli and Ingham 2007:18f.).

  15. This corresponds to periods m1 and mx1 in the PPCME2. Not included in our analysis is The Ormulum, the only non-prose text contained in the PPCME2. The figures presented here are based on clauses containing finite main verbs only. The data in Haeberli and Ingham (2007) differ as they are based on both finite main verbs and finite auxiliaries.

  16. p<0.001 for the difference between OE and early ME (Fisher’s exact test).

  17. That the preverbal position is a general adverb position is also suggested by Haeberli and Ingham’s (2007:8, fn. 8) observation that adverb type does not seem to play an important role with respect to the variation in SAdvV and SVAdv order in the period 1150–1250.

  18. As for SnotV order, it is virtually non-existent in the middle of the 14th century. Among 166 main and subordinate clauses with not following the subject, there are 4 cases in which not precedes the finite verb (2.4 %).

  19. As for AI, the frequency of SAdvV in main clauses remains at the level of the earliest ME texts (18.1 % (n = 72) as compared to 18.4 % for the period 1150–1250). In terms of the proposals made for ECEPP below, this stagnation can be related to the fact that, as pointed out by Kroch and Taylor (1997:312), the main clause syntax of AI is conservative also with respect to V2.

  20. That ECEPP is among the texts that show a decline of V2 is shown by data presented in Haeberli (2011:147). In clauses with an initial non-subject and a transitive main verb, the frequency of subject-verb inversion is reduced by half compared to what is found in a sample of OE texts.

  21. Even Biberauer and Roberts (2010), who reject V-to-T movement for OE and early ME, postulate such movement for late ME (2010:278ff.). The evidence they provide for V-to-T in late ME is of the same type as shown in (9), (12) and (13) above for earlier English.

  22. For our analysis of the PPCEME, we excluded all texts that are also contained in the PCEEC. Cf. Taylor et al. (2006) for a list of these overlap files. Furthermore, we restricted our searches in the PPCME2 to texts that can be assigned clearly to one of the periods we use. We therefore excluded all texts whose composition date and manuscript date belong to different periods (i.e. all PPCME2 files with the extensions m23, m24, m34, mx4).

  23. A final observation with respect to the data examined concerns the particles away, back and forth. These are tagged as adverbs in the corpora. However, we will not include them in our database and treat them on a par with particles such as up or down instead.

  24. The only difference compared to Ellegård concerns period 5 (1525–1550), which is further subdivided by him into 1525–1535 and 1535–1550. For our data, there were no grounds to treat this period differently from the others.

  25. The figures for the period 1350–1420 are quite heavily influenced by one text that has a relatively high frequency of SAdvV order, The Brut or The Chronicles of England (86 clauses with SAdvV out of 323 (26.6 %)). If we leave this text aside (cf. Haeberli 2014:7 for a possible account of its distinctive status), the frequency of SAdvV is lowest in the period 1350–1420, with 6.3 %. There would then already be a significant increase from 1350–1420 to 1420–1475 (p<0.05). For our purposes, the exact identification of the low point in the development of SAdvV is not crucial, however.

  26. Period 2 vs. period 3: chi-square = 36.35, p<0.001. Period 3 vs. period 4: chi-square = 73.08; p<0.001.

  27. Period 4 vs. period 5: chi-square = 2.02, p = 0.16.

  28. Period 4 vs. period 10: chi-square = 8.12, p<0.005.

  29. Period 10 vs. period 11: chi-square = 35.18, p<0.001.

  30. As in Sect. 2, we will adopt non-Kaynian clause structures for simplicity’s sake. Once again, we do not think that our main points are affected by this choice in any substantial way.

    A rightward adjunction analysis would typically hold for an example like (ia). At least in certain cases, however, some form of V-movement may nevertheless be involved with postverbal adverbs. This is shown in (ib).

    1. (i)
      figure q

    (ib) contains a verb with a PP complement and an intervening adverb. This suggests that PDE has a form of V-movement that allows the verb to move away from its PP complement (cf. Pesetsky 1989; Johnson 1991 for analyses along these lines). But the landing site of this movement cannot be very high as the verb still remains below other diagnostics for V-movement (Sue never looks carefully at him. vs. *Sue looks never carefully at him.) and it cannot be separated from a nominal object, which, in terms of Pesetsky’s and Johnson’s analyses, must undergo object shift (*Sue examined carefully the document.). Thus, if we assume that (ib) involves a short type of V-movement targeting a very low head, it could be considered as a residue of the long V-movement of the French type that we find in early English. Our focus in this paper will be on long V-movement as it is that type that shows a clear diachronic development in English, and we will generally leave issues related to short V-movement aside here. But see fn. 49 for some further observations.

  31. It should be pointed out, however, that the restriction to objects containing at most three words does not have an influence on the general developmental trends identified below. Thus, if we include all clauses containing a non-pronominal object in our counts, i.e. also those with four or more words, the pattern in the decrease of SVAdvO order is entirely parallel to that observed in Table 2. The developments simply take place at a slightly higher level, i.e. around 5 to 10 % above the figures for SVAdvO shown in Table 2, as would be expected.

  32. Similar frequencies can also be found in the early ME periods discussed in Sect. 2.3. In the period 1150–1250, SVAdvO order occurs in 46.1 % of the relevant clauses (n = 91), whereas in the period 1250–1350 the frequency is 57.7 % (n = 26).

  33. SVAdvO compared to SAdvVO/SVOAdv, period 1 vs. period 2: chi-square = 7.43, p<0.01; period 2 vs. period 3: chi-square = 6.17, p<0.025.

  34. A potential question that may arise here is why, in our data, the frequency of verb-object non-adjacency remains at a non-negligible level of around 10 % from the end of the 16th century to the 20th century although this order is not generally considered as grammatical in PDE. There are various factors that may explain why we can still observe a considerable number of word orders falling into the category SVAdvO in our data: (a) Although it is on its way out now, the V-movement option has been maintained with main verb have in British English until today (possibly by analogy to auxiliary have). Several examples in our data set indeed involve finite main verb have (e.g. 11 out of 20 cases of SVAdvO in period 9 involve main verb have, or 8 out of 15 in period 11). (b) Punctuation occasionally suggests that certain adverbs are used parenthetically. (c) Some degree adverbs such as rather or quite are sometimes parsed as VP-adverbs in the corpora (SVAdvO) although an analysis of these adverbs as modifiers contained in the object would be conceivable as well. (d) A similar observation can be made with respect to certain PPs that follow the object in SVAdvO order. They could sometimes be interpreted as modifying the object rather than the VP, thus making the object heavy and a potential candidate for heavy NP shift. (e) Objects of three or less words may not be entirely banned from undergoing heavy NP shift (cf. e.g. contrastive focus).

    Although the options in (a) to (e) may not account for all the remaining cases of SVAdvO order from the middle of the 16th century onwards, they cover a considerable number of those and the frequencies could therefore be argued to be closer to 0 than the data in Table 2 suggest. However, as it can be difficult to determine e.g. whether an adverb is used parenthetically or whether an adjunct modifies the VP or the object, we did not try to eliminate examples that could be of type (a) to (e) from our data. Instead, we simply adopted the structures proposed in the corpora and based our quantitative data on those. Assuming that the scenarios in (a) to (e) are spread more or less evenly over the different periods, this decision should not affect our overall conclusion that the major developments with respect to V-movement take place around 1500. The level at which SVAdvO stabilizes after 1550 (around 10 % as in our data or below if certain cases had been excluded) is not essential in this respect.

  35. The main exception is the period 1475–1500 with a frequency of SVOAdv of 64.8 %. Both the rise from the previous period and the subsequent fall are statistically significant. Thus, it looks as if, initially, the loss of a postverbal adverb placement option (SVAdvO) is replaced by another one (SVOAdv), and that it is only then that the natural alternative in terms of a V-movement analysis, i.e. SAdvVO, takes over. We have to leave it open why this would have been the case. What is essential for our purposes is simply the fact that in the long-term development in Table 2 right adjunction does not lose ground to the benefit of preverbal adverb placement.

  36. The relevant example is given in (i) below:

    1. (i)
      figure u

  37. Period 2 vs. period 3: chi-square = 9.64, p<0.005. Period 3 vs. period 4: chi-square = 3.21; p<0.1. Period 4 vs. period 5: chi-square = 5.32, p<0.025. It is only the transition from period 3 to period 4 that is not significant. Given that the percentages fit perfectly well into the general trend, the lack of significance is likely to be due to the small sample sizes in these two periods.

  38. For the overall figures including high frequency verbs and religious prose see Haeberli and Ihsane (2014).

  39. As for example in:

    1. (i)
      figure x

  40. Illustrations from the period 1420–1475 are given in (i).

    1. (i)
      figure y

  41. The Northern Prose Rule of St. Bennet is an exception here. This text is the only northern text in our corpus, and, as is well known (cf. e.g. Lass 1992:137), northern varieties lost verbal inflectional distinctions earlier than other varieties of ME.

  42. Among 174 main clauses with the 2sg subject thou between 1500 and 1700, we have found only five clear exceptions to the use of the -(e)st ending in our corpora.

  43. The same conclusion is likely to hold for the version of the RAH formulated by Bobaljik and Thráinsson (1998). In their framework, a language must have V-movement if tense and agreement morphology can co-occur. Once again 2sg is the crucial context here, as it is the 2sg ending that co-occurs longest with past tense morphology in English (-(e)d-st). Unfortunately, 2sg past tense forms are rare in our corpus and the observations made in the literature on the loss of -st in the past tense are not entirely conclusive, either (cf. e.g. Lass 1992, 1999). However, there is no clear evidence suggesting that the loss of the 2sg ending in the past tense occurs considerably earlier than in the present tense. The expected morphological change is therefore likely to be too late for Bobaljik and Thráinsson’s system to account for the decline of V-movement in the 15th century. For a more detailed discussion of the issues raised in this section, see Haeberli and Ihsane (2014).

  44. The consequences of the approach outlined here are to a large extent identical to those of Bobaljik and Thráinsson’s (1998) framework, which was based on earlier Minimalist hypotheses. Whereas Bobaljik and Thráinsson relate cross-linguistic differences to the number of projections occurring in the syntactic structure, what counts in our system is the number of active inflectional heads marked with an unvalued V-feature. In principle, parametrization concerning the presence or absence of functional projections would also be possible in the system adopted here, but we leave it open whether this type of parametrization indeed plays a role or not.

  45. In a typological overview, Biberauer and Roberts mention “[p]oor tense … hence no V-to-T” for a language like English and “rich tense … hence V-to-T” for languages like Italian or French (2010:267). This suggests that they adopt a strong version of the “rich tense hypothesis”. Here, we accept the possibility that V-movement can occur independently of morphological richness.

  46. One issue we have to leave open here is how the variation in Romance V-movement as described by Schifano (2014) could be integrated into the system proposed in the text. On the basis of the distribution of finite verbs with respect to different types of adverbs, Schifano identifies four distinct targets of V-movement in the inflectional domain in Romance. According to the assumptions made in the text, the Romance languages should generally have V-movement to a high functional head. Since both tense and mood distinctions are made in the inflectional morphology of Romance, T and M should have unvalued V-features and V should have unvalued T- and M-features. For reasons of locality, the verb should therefore move at least to the second highest head, or, if the highest head carries an EPP-feature, to the highest inflectional head. This gives two possible landing sites in the inflectional domain rather than the four that would be needed according to Schifano. At first sight, there are two ways to obtain the kind of variation suggested by the Romance languages within the system proposed here. One possibility is that the relation between the presence of V-features on inflectional heads and inflectional morphology is more complex than we have been assuming so far. An alternative option is that it is not necessarily the head of the V-movement chain that needs to be spelled out but that lower copies in the inflectional domain can be phonologically realized. We have to leave a closer examination of these issues for future research.

  47. Cf. also Biberauer and Roberts (2010:288) for the suggestion that mood may be an important factor related to the presence of V-to-T in Icelandic.

  48. Cf. König and van der Auwera (1994:238, 286, 334) on mood in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. As for the PDE subjunctive found in the mandative construction (e.g. I require that he be there at 8.), we follow Roberts (1985:41, fn. 12) among others in assuming that this involves an empty modal.

    In this connection, it is also worth pointing out that in Faroese, where V-to-T is nearly lost (cf. Heycock et al. 2012), a productive mood distinction between indicative and subjunctive is no longer made (König and van der Auwera 1994:205). Thus, the loss of V-to-T in Faroese is compatible with the assumptions made here.

  49. However, for V to remain accessible as a goal for T, V has to move at least to the edge of vP (i.e. v) as would be required by the Phase Impenetrability Condition and the standard assumption that vP is a phase (Chomsky 2000, 2001). This opens up the possibility that V-movement to the phase edge corresponds to the short type of V-movement discussed in fn. 30.

    Another consequence is that V2 cannot be related to an Agree relation between C and V since V on T intervenes and languages such as the Mainland Scandinavian ones, which do not have V-to-T, do not have the process required to circumvent the intervention effect. V-movement to C must therefore be related to an Agree relation between C (with EPP) and T or v.

  50. As for the exact location of the adverb, both a specifier or an adjunction analysis would be conceivable. The structure in (21) only includes projections for which we have evidence on the basis of verb placement. By representing only these, we do not exclude the possibility that other projections related to tense, mood/modality or aspect occur in the clause structure of English and that these projections host adverbs as in the frameworks proposed by Alexiadou (1997) or Cinque (1999). Alternatively, in line with more traditional approaches, adverbs could be licensed in adjoined positions. For our purposes, nothing hinges on this issue.

  51. By the end of the ME period, indicative and subjunctive with weak verbs can only be distinguished in 2sg and 3sg present and in 2sg past due to the presence of distinctive morphemes in the indicative.

  52. Some support for this hypothesis comes from the development of SAdvV order in different clause types. After clear clause type asymmetries in OE and the earliest ME period, there is no statistically significant difference between main and subordinate clauses with respect to the frequency of occurrence of SAdvV order in the period 1250 to 1350 any more. The same is true for the period 1350 to 1420 without St. Benet. In the data from 1420 to 1550, however, this state of affairs changes. Subordinate clauses again tend to have higher rates of SAdvV order than main clauses. In terms of a contact scenario, this clause type contrast can be argued to have emerged due to the high frequency of SAdvV order in subordinate clauses in northern varieties.

  53. In the context of negative clauses, an additional point should briefly be made concerning the structure in (21). At the stage when the verb precedes negation but not adverbs, object pronouns are the only elements that regularly occur between V and not in our data, and they do so until Vnot order is lost. (i) shows an example from the late 18th century.

    1. (i)

      but the infatuated Jews understood them not, … (WOLLASTON-1793,11.69)

    Thus, there must be a position for object pronouns between Asp and Neg in (21), i.e. a position corresponding to what is labelled Spec,AgrOP in earlier work. As pointed out in fn. 50, our analysis would be compatible with additional functional projections apart from those presented in (21).

  54. Such non-habitual uses already occur, albeit as a minority option, in the 13th/14th century data that Garrett examines. Cf. Garrett (1998:314ff.) for an account of how non-habitual uses of do may have emerged in negative and interrogative clauses. Given that auxiliary do never has any semantics that would make it a plausible candidate for any another inflectional head such as M or T, we may assume that the weakening of the aspectual semantics does not go together with a syntactic reanalysis. But cf. fn. 56 below for a possible later development.

  55. These proposals imply that the loss of V-movement is not the cause of the emergence of do-support but rather that it is caused by the latter. Cf. also Lightfoot (2006) for viewing the correlation between the two phenomena in this way.

  56. In simple affirmative contexts, the situation is different. An affirmative clause with or without a V-feature on Asp cannot be distinguished at the surface. Together with the assumption that a structure with some phonological material is dispreferred to an identical one without that material, this may account for why in the long run non-emphatic periphrastic do in affirmative clauses was not viable despite its initial rise until the second half of the 16th century.

    A question that the analysis in the text raises is how the grammar rules out word orders of the type SnotV in PDE. One possibility is that, as the use of do-support starts being limited to negatives and interrogatives, Neg becomes a head that must be lexically realized and that, if no other auxiliary is available, this is done by do. In cases of contracted negation, the auxiliary together with negation are inserted under Neg (cf. also Zwicky and Pullum 1983 for treating cases of the type auxn’t as single lexical items). With non-contracted negation, the auxiliary is inserted under Neg, whereas negation occupies the specifier. SnotV may therefore be ruled out through lexical constraints on Neg.

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Acknowledgements

Parts of the material discussed here were presented at the University of Lisbon (DIGS 14, July 2012), the University of Zurich (ICEHL 17, August 2012), the University of Stuttgart (July 2013), and the University of Geneva (ICL 19, August 2013). We would like to thank the audiences for useful feedback. Special thanks go to three anonymous reviewers and Marcel den Dikken for constructive comments and suggestions for improvements. Any remaining errors are our own. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant no. 146450.

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    Eric Haeberli & Tabea Ihsane

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Haeberli, E., Ihsane, T. Revisiting the loss of verb movement in the history of English. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34, 497–542 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9312-x

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