Word Order in 17th Century English: A Study of the Stabilisation of the XSV Pattern (review)

This study represents a continuation of an earlier study by the same author (Word order patterns in Early Modern English with special reference to the position of the subject and the finite verb, Oslo: Novus Press, 1998). It is based on an extensive corpus of 17th century prose texts and investigates the use and diachronic development of inversion (XVS) and non-inversion (XSV) in (declarative main) clauses with initial nonsubject elements (i.e. ‘X’). The corpus is composed of the four text categories ‘descriptive prose’, ‘religious prose’, ‘history’, and ‘letters’ and is subdivided into three thirty-five-year periods (from 1600 to 1635, 1635 to 1670, and 1670 to 1705).

The main result emerging from the analysis is that the development from the XVS to the XSV pattern is by no means a steady process: While the rate of inversion decreases significantly from the beginning to the middle of the 17th century, it increases again from the middle to the end, so that there is hardly any difference in the overall inversion rate between the beginning and the end of the century. A significant overall decrease in inversion from the beginning to the end of the century is revealed for clauses with initial nonnegative elements; in accordance with the overall result, however, this development is not steady either, with a slight increase from the middle towards the end of the century.

In addition to this overall result, many more detailed results emerge from Bækken’s study. In an investigation of the types of initial element occurring in the relevant clauses, for example, adverbials are revealed to be the most frequent in all three periods. Other frequent types are direct objects and subject predicatives (as in Great is the truth every where; 14). Of these types, initial adverbials and direct objects occur with a similar number of XVS and XSV patterns, while subject predicatives occur significantly more often in the former pattern. Different types of adverbials are also shown to have different preferences with respect to word order: conjuncts are typically found in XSV structures and adjuncts in XVS structures, with here and there displaying the highest inversion rates.

Word order is also shown to be affected by the types of subjects and verbs present, with nominal (as opposed to pronominal and clausal) subjects and intransitive verbs preferably occurring in an XVS order. The latter phenomenon increases across the time-span investigated, while the XVS pattern with simple transitive verbs decreases almost to the point of nonexistence towards the end of the century.

A further aspect studied is the relation between the word order and the information structure of the clause. B finds that if subjects represent new information, the XVS order is preferred.

The study concludes with a comparison of the inverted and noninverted patterns in different text categories. A regular decrease of inversion is only found in the category ‘religious prose’. The overall wavelike development (i.e. a decrease of inversion towards the middle and an increase towards the end of the century) is evident most clearly in the categories ‘history’ and ‘letters’. B’s study, which is written in a very accessible style, therefore demonstrates in great detail how word order patterns are intricately related to syntactic, pragmatic, and textual factors.