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(146)In this place begins that fruitful and plentiful Country which was call’d the Vale of Esham (1726, Daniel Defoe, Tour of Great Britain 441, 6)

In general terms, instances of these patterns can be regarded as survivals of an earlier verb-second stage of the language (though, as shown by Nevalainen, 1997, before the eighteenth century, sentences like (144) and (145) sometimes lacked verb-second).

As for the causes of the decline and loss of verb-second in most contexts, there are several factors that appear to have played a role in this, though their exact contribution and interaction remain to be established to everybody’s satisfaction. One factor that has often been cited is language contact. This could have taken the form of influence from French and Scandinavian, either directly (from French, in which inversion was being lost in the Middle Ages) or indirectly (where speakers in a contact situation might evolve a grammar without any inversion at all, rather than retaining this rule together with its individual language-specific intricacies). A problem for this idea is the fact that it does not straightforwardly account for the continued use of verb-second, which we saw persisted into the seventeenth century. Another factor that has been investigated is the role of de-cliticisation of personal pronouns (see Lightfoot, 1999, for a summary of this work). If at some point, and for some independent reason, preverbal pronominal subjects, as in (140), came to be interpreted as just ordinary subjects, instead of special clitics, this would have the effect of enormously increasing the number of inversion-less clauses (already attested in sentences like (138) and (139)) and this could have set in motion a process leading to the loss of inversion except in some well-defined grammatical contexts. Such a reinterpretation may in fact have been triggered by a situation of language contact arising from increased mobility of a population that was somewhat linguistically differentiated due to earlier immigrations. Thus speakers of Scandinavian-influenced varieties might not have had clitic pronouns in their grammar (i.e. they would produce orders as in (143)), and they might therefore reinterpret clauses in southern varieties which had clitic subject pronouns (i.e. (142)) as simply being clauses with the order subject–verb, without any inversion. In a situation of close contact involving large groups of speakers (which is attested for late medieval and early modern London), this could easily lead to the development by language learners of grammars lacking inversion.

In the discussion above we suggested that in OE verbs are usually in clause-final position, but that a finite verb is moved to second position in main clauses, i.e. the language could be labelled as being ‘OV with V2’. We also saw that there are several complications to this simple picture that need to be taken into account. One further complication is the fact that some main clauses have OV order. This is not a frequent pattern, but it is sometimes found when the object is a personal pronoun, as in example (147):

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at any frequency only in a few grammatical environments. Chief among these is the pattern with an auxiliary and a negated object, as in (151); see Moerenhout & van der Wurff (2000).

(151)and sche seyd nay, be here feyth sche wuld no more days eve w þer-jn ‘and she said, “No”, by her faith she would give you no more time in this matter’ (Paston Letters 128.13–14)

After the middle of the sixteenth century, all instances of OV order cease to occur in prose, except as relics of an earlier era, in the form of quotations, proverbs and fixed expressions like (152):

(152)He that mischief hatches, mischief catches.

In poetry, OV order continues to be used productively much longer: until the beginning of the twentieth century all kinds of examples of OV, not just ones like (151), are regularly found there. An example of OV and one of verb-second in nineteenth-century verse are given in (153) and (154):

(153)He who would build his fame up high, / The rule and plummet must apply (1834, Walter Savage Landor, ‘To Wordsworth’ 37–38)

(154)Here will I sit and wait (1853, Matthew Arnold, ‘The Scholar-Gypsy’ 16)

Having seen how OV was lost and VO established itself as the canonical word order, we can now inquire into the causes of this development. Since the change from OV to VO order, in English but also other languages, has attracted the attention of many linguists, there is no shortage of proposed explanations. As in the case of verb-second, language contact has also been held responsible for the decline of OV order, whether by direct influence from French (though for this hypothesis, the loss of preverbal pronominal objects in English is a problem, as is the fact that OV survives more tenaciously in ME southern texts than in northern texts) or by more indirect influence from Scandinavian (with a situation of bilingualism or perhaps even pidginisation said to promote the use of VO order; see Weerman, 1993; Kroch & Taylor, 2000). A different line of approach, pursued by Colman (1988a), Ogura (2001) and others, has focused on the possible effect of heavy processing costs of embedded clauses in an OV language, where – in theory at least – complicated sentences like (155) could occur:

(155)This is the cat that the rat that the malt that in the house that Jack built lay ate killed.

Another recurrent theme in accounts of the change is the loss of case distinctions, as discussed in Chapter 2. When the syntactic function of an NP could no longer be read off its case endings, word order came to be the sole formal marker of subjects and direct objects, and it has been suggested that they came to be distinguished more clearly by increased use of the SVO pattern, which was common in the language anyway, in both main and subordinate clauses. There are many variations

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One of the options existing in OE was the order direct object–indirect object, which was about as frequent as the reverse order. Examples of both orders are given in (159) and (160):

(159)ðonne he nyle ða bisne (DO) oðrum(IO) eowian

If one of the objects is pronominal (this is usually the indirect object), it nearly always precedes the nominal object, which is another example of pronouns favouring positions early in the clause. When there are two pronominal objects, the predominant order is for the direct object to come first, as in (161):

As the above three examples show, the indirect object is often preverbal, in accordance with the OV character of OE.

The pattern in (161) continues as the most frequent order in ME when both objects are pronominal, and so does the pattern IO–DO when only the indirect object is pronominal, of which we give an ME example in (162):

The pair in (159) and (160), however, undergoes change: the order DO–IO (with both objects being NPs) is still found in early ME, as in (163), but then goes into a serious decline and disappears by the mid-fourteenth century.

The loss of sentences like (163) has been accounted for by an appeal to the loss of dative and accusative inflections and the consequent need to distinguish the two objects by means of more rigid word order, with the order IO–DO becoming fixed because this was the usual order when the IO was a pronoun, as in the very frequent pattern of (162). However, this fails to account for the fact that sentences like (163) continued to be used long after the inflectional distinction