Word order variation in the VP in Old Icelandic

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe and account for the word order variation found in the VP in Old Icelandic. It is shown that even though the IP in Old Icelandic was clearly head-initial, with movement of the finite verb to I° accounting for the obligatory verb-second word order, the headedness of the VP is far from obvious. The majority of the logically possible word order patterns actually occur in the VP in Old Icelandic, and because of the frequency and stability of OV-order, together with the distribution of pronominal objects and particles, it is not feasible to assume that the VP in Old Icelandic was uniformly either head-initial or head-find. By assuming that the head parameter was unspecified, we can account for the great majority of all Old Icelandic sentences without positing any movement of constituents of the VP, except for postposing of full NPs ; this appears to be the most natural way of accounting for the variation. Finally, it is pointed out that the 'Minimalist' conception of structure-building and lexical insertion makes it natural to assume that the same word order principles apply to base-generated structures and to structures derived by syntactic movement

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