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between dative and accusative had worn away. Another reason for the loss of (163) may have been increasing competition from the indirect object expressed by a to-phrase (see Section 3.4.2), which nearly always followed the direct object.

In both (162) and (163) the indirect object follows the verb, and this is not accidental: in the ME period as a whole, indirect objects preceding the verb are very rare. In fact, so few examples of preverbal indirect objects have been found that it is difficult to say whether their decline follows more or less the same route as that of preverbal direct objects, as sketched in the previous section. This rarity may be partly due to an overall decrease in the number of clauses with an indirect object, which has been noted in ME texts and attributed to the loss of a large number of OE ditransitive verbs from the lexicon of the language (compare Chapter 4).

After the ME period, there is only one further change to be observed in the ordering of objects. When both objects are pronominal, the predominant order in Old and ME was DO–IO (I gave it him, as in (161)); this pattern still exists (see Biber et al., 1999: 929) but seems to have been overtaken in frequency by the reverse order IO–DO (I gave him it) at some point during the nineteenth century, in the south of England at least. It could be hypothesised that there is a preference for the IO–DO pattern due the obligatory use of this order when both objects are NPs, but this would be a rather imprecise idea that cannot explain the robust survival of DO–IO order with pronouns during all those centuries that NP objects have consistently had IO–DO order.

While a great deal is known about the history of subject, verb and object placement in English sentences, less attention has so far been paid to the position of other sentence elements and the changes that have affected them. In particular the position of adverbial phrases relative to other constituents has been poorly studied, in spite of the fact that they are very frequent (Crystal, 1980 reports that nearly two-thirds of all sentences in a corpus of spoken English contain an adverbial, and they do not seem to be much less frequent in older stages of the language). One reason for this neglect may be the difficulty of establishing a positional framework for adverbials, which typically show a high degree of freedom in placement. Nevertheless, a certain amount of work has been done on some aspects of the history of adverbial positioning.

One type of adverb that has received attention is the particle found in presentday phrasal verbs like turn up, hold out and take down. These combinations go back to OE structures of the type shown in (164) and (165):

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possible result of verb fronting either, and that is why it is highly infrequent. The position of particles in OE thus provides some confirmation for the conclusions reached in Sections 3.5.2 and 3.5.3

In early ME, there is a rapid change in the order of the particle and the verb: after 1100, the order particle–verb becomes rare, so that in the great majority of cases the particle follows the verb, in both main and subordinate clauses. An example is given in (169):

This change has been linked to the change from predominant OV to VO order, discussed in Section 3.5.3, in such a way that the verb has been taken to be no longer the final element in the predicate, but the initial element, which would lead to the order [verb X Y Z], with X, Y, Z being objects, particles, or any other constituents of the predicate. However, this link is not entirely straightforward, since other constituents continue to precede the verb fairly regularly for several centuries even though particles nearly always follow it. Sentence (169), in which the object ealle his castles is preverbal but the particle up postverbal, is a good case in point (see Section 3.5.3 for details).

A subsequent change affecting particles concerns not position but frequency: particle verbs have become enormously frequent in Modern English. This appears to a large extent to be due to an increase in combinations having a particle with metaphorical meaning (as in let somebody down, take up a hobby, etc.), which set in after the early ModE period (for descriptive data on their rise in frequency, both in types and tokens, see Claridge, 2000).

There are just a few other points that we can deal with here concerning the position of adverbs. Generally speaking, the overall historical picture is one of relative freedom in OE slowly giving way to a more constrained system of the type operative in present-day English. This development is illustrated well by the case of adverbs intervening between the object and the verb. In OE, when objects were often preverbal, a clause often had an adverb or even a longer phrase separating the object from the verb, as examples like (133) and (137) show. In ME, preverbal objects slowly become less usual, but they can still be followed by an adverbial, as in examples like (150). However, the intervening element in this type of ME sentence is usually fairly short, a restriction that is perhaps understandable for a language in which OV order was becoming more and more marked.

ME clauses with VO order also allow an adverb to intervene between the object and the verb. An example is given in (170):

(170)he scapyd of hard & left þer hir scrippe

‘he escaped with difficulty and left her bag there’ (MKempe A 118.15)

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Use of this option declines after c.1500, but examples such as (171) – often featuring the verb have – show that it can still be found as late as the nineteenth century:

(171)Accordingly, we had always wine and dessert (1851–3, Gaskell, Cranford iii.25)

The reason for the loss of [V adverb O] order, as in (170)–(171), has been sought in structural changes in the make-up of the clause, which are linked to the disappearance of inflectional marking on verbs, in particular the loss of the inflectional marker -en for plural. This idea, rather technical in its full details but clearly set out in Roberts (1993), is based on an observed similarity between ME and Modern French, which still has fairly rich verbal inflections as well as the option of using [V adverb O] order.

A special case of the [V X O] pattern is found in negative clauses without do or other auxiliary, where an object NP can be separated from the verb by the word not, as in (172) (see also Section 3.3.6):

(172)I . . . saw not Betty (1667, Pepys, Diary VIII 514.2 (1 Nov.))

This pattern is found from the thirteenth century, when not started to be used as the regular marker of negation, until the eighteenth century, when the use of do had become the rule in sentences of this type. During this entire period, there is a clear split between ordinary NPs and pronouns: the former always follow not, as in (172), while pronouns virtually always precede not, as in (173):

(173)I have it not by me, or I would copy you the exact passage. (1848, Gaskell,

Mary Barton v.62)

Note that (173), a rather late example of this pattern, features the lexical verb have, which is well known for long resisting the use of do (and for behaving like an auxiliary also in other ways; compare (171)).

After our discussion of word-order changes above, we will also consider some of their consequences. In particular, the change from predominant OV order to predominant VO order that English underwent in the Middle Ages has been associated with the development of several new constructions. These involve the rise of some new infinitival complementation patterns and the extension of preposition stranding.

A first innovation is the so-called ‘accusative-plus-infinitive’ or Exceptional Case Marking construction, a modern example of which is (174):

(174)We believe this to be wrong.

This type of sentence, in which the matrix verb takes a clausal complement which itself has an overt NP subject, does not occur in OE (except in glosses to Latin

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texts). The first unambiguous examples are found around 1400; the fifteenthcentury instances tend to occur mainly in formal texts, and even today there is something elevated about the construction in many cases. Careful assessment of a great deal of textual evidence by several scholars has led to a consensus that the construction represents a case of syntactic borrowing from Latin; but there were some prior English-internal changes that made this borrowing possible. We give an early example in (175):

(175)she dare not aventure her money to be brought vp to London for feere of robbyng

‘She dare not venture her money to be brought up to London for fear of

The rise of this construction in English can be seen as a result of the change to regular VO order. To see how this explanation works, consider the NP her money in (175). Thematically, it functions as the subject to the infinitival verb to be brought vp, but as far as case marking is concerned, it can be said to be the object of the matrix verb venture. However, this is only possible if verbs precede their objects. In OE, where the object regularly preceded the verb, it was impossible for the relevant NP to occupy the canonical object position of the matrix clause and at the same time the subject position of the infinitival clause. For this reason, the construction could only gain a foothold in English after the modern VO order had fully established itself, a change that, as we saw above, was nearing completion by 1400. This interpretation derives further strength from developments in the history of Dutch and German: in both languages, which are firmly OV, we can see some toying with this construction in strongly Latin-influenced texts from the Renaissance, but the construction did not spread from there and died out again.

Another infinitival construction which first arose in the late ME period, probably also as a result of the change from OV to VO order, is the so-called ‘for NP-to-VP’ construction, as in (176):

(176)It will be awkward for anyone to claim their money back.

(in the sense ‘It will be awkward if anyone claims their money back.’)

Here, the infinitival clause has an overt subject introduced by for. Again, this construction is not found in OE texts but starts being used in the fourteenth century (first with the subject taking the form of a bare NP, but from the sixteenth century onwards in the form of a PP introduced by for). In this case, there is little evidence for influence from Latin. Instead, its origins are probably to be sought in the following OE construction, which itself has in fact survived to this day:

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þær nane myrhðe on næfdest there no happiness on had-not

‘From that you could understand that you did not take joy in it.’ (Bo 7.15.11)

Both of these cases also allow an option whereby the complement immediately precedes the preposition, as shown in (182) and (183):

‘And after a while he went to the tree and looked for fruit on it, but found none.’ (ÆCHom II, 30 237.72)

On the basis of an analysis proposed for Modern Dutch, which has a partly similar pattern, van Kemenade (1987) suggests that preposition stranding in OE always involves a complement being fronted through the position immediately to the left of the preposition, i.e. that the order in (182)–(183) forms the basis for that in (180)–(181). Any element that cannot occur in the order of (182)–(183), such as an ordinary NP, also cannot strand its preposition.

Some further cases of preposition stranding which existed in OE, such as relative clauses without a relative pronoun, as in (184), have been analysed as containing a kind of empty pronoun, or silent counterpart to þær:

This rather limited array of stranding options was greatly extended in the ME period. Around 1200, the first few examples are found of stranding in passives; (185) is one of them:

‘It was a sad sight to see her lovely body dealt with so cruelly.’ (c.1225, St Juliana (Roy) 22.195)

Obviously, there cannot be an empty pronoun involved here. Instead, this sentence type could be analysed in the way present-day prepositional passives usually are, i.e. as having a combination of verb and preposition that at some level is equivalent to a transitive verb. This would make the passive in (185) comparable to ordinary

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Set off against these gains in preposition stranding, there are also some losses to record. The OE option of separating a personal pronoun from its preposition, as in (180), and also the order pronoun–preposition, (182), died out soon after 1200. Combinations with there and a non-adjacent preposition, (181), also did not survive the ME period. Much more tenacious were combinations like therein, thereat and thereon, as in the OE example (183). In the ME period, these expressions are frequently used as alternatives to prepositional phrases like in it, at it and for it; an example with therewith is given in (192):

The pattern was also extended to combinations with here and where, as in (193) and (194):

These combinations are also very frequent in the early ModE period. After 1800, however, they become less usual, and today they are characteristic of archaic and/or legal usage, although a number of them are still used more widely as lexicalised units (such as therefore, whereabouts, the wherewithal and the why and the wherefore). This decline might in general terms be attributed to their divergent word order (with the preposition being preceded by its complement), were it not for the fact that the pattern survived for more than four hundred years after this order had become divergent.