Inflectional Morphology and the Loss of Verb-Second In English

Abstract

Abstract Old English (OE) exhibits word-order patterns which are reminiscent of the Verb Second (V2) phenomenon found in many modern Germanic languages. Thus, fronting of some constituent often leads to subject-verb inversion, to a word order in which the finite verb occurs in second position. This chapter addresses the question of why V2 was lost in the history of English. It proposes that the loss of V2 in English resulted from the loss of empty expletives and ultimately of a change in the verbal morphology. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 5.2 contains some general observations on the loss of V2 in English. Section 5.3 discusses and rejects two previous explanations of the loss of V2, and develops a new account based on comparative evidence from modern Germanic. Section 5.4 shows how the loss of V2 can be related to change in the verbal morphology of English. Section 5.5 addresses some remaining issues, while Section 5.6 summarizes the chapter.

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