From OV to VO in Early Middle English (review)

The transition from Old English (OE) to Middle English (ME) is an intriguing phase in the history of English. The concomitant word-order shift from OV to VO is explored by Carola Trips in her revised doctoral dissertation.

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–6), establishes that the transition to VO is assumed to have taken place in Early Middle English (EME), 1150–1350. To show that syntactic influence from the Scandinavian language of the earlier Viking settlers caused this change, T has collected data from the late-twelfth-century Ormulum and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English. Ch. 2, ‘The dialects of Middle English’ (7–36), is less about ME dialects than about the OE-ME transition, the Anglo-Scandinavian language contacts, EME literature, and the contents and use of the syntactically annotated corpus. Ch. 3, ‘Syntactic change’ (37–74), emphasizes external mechanisms of change, language contact, and language acquisition.

Ch. 4, ‘Word order change in Early Middle English’ (75–120), opens with a discussion of OE word order and theories on OV order. Word-order variation in EME is then described as competing grammars. Dialectal differences are highlighted: western and northeastern EME texts display more VO than southeastern ones. Since this distribution reflects Scandinavian settlement in the northeast, T regards VO as Scandinavian influence on English: she assumes that English speakers learned Scandinavian imperfectly, which made this pattern spread.

‘Object movement’ is discussed in Ch. 5 (121–222), dealing with both object shift and scrambling. No evidence for shift is available in the Ormulum, but this Scandinavian feature actually postdates the Viking Age. Instances of scrambling are contained in EME texts. In Ch. 6, ‘V2 and cliticisation of subject pronouns’ (223–74), T observes that Modern English has V2 only as a restricted, residual pattern. In addition to V2, OE could with pronominal subjects have V3, still used in southern ME. Some northern texts show a non-OE type of V2, a sign of Scandinavian influence according to T, especially of English language learning by speakers of Scandinavian. Ch. 7 (275–330) deals with ‘Stylistic fronting’, an operation frequent in earlier Scandinavian. Stylistic fronting in the Ormulum is analyzed by T as a prosodic feature: it is part of the author’s grammar and often needed to maintain the iambic rhythm.

Ch. 8 (331–33) summarizes the findings: if the contact with Scandinavian speakers was strong enough to promote the shift to VO in some regions, then syntax could also be affected otherwise. Evidence for Scandinavian-triggered changes exists especially in the Ormulum.

The nonlexical influence of Scandinavian on English is a difficult issue on which full scholarly agreement is unlikely to emerge. In her interesting book, T provides a wealth of quantitative information to support her hypothesis of such influence. The book also contains valuable summaries of word-order theories from the 1990s, but the adoption and spread of non-English syntactic features in EME could have been explored more.