Verb and Object Order in the History of English: A Language-Internal Account

Chiara De Bastiani

sept 2020 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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This study takes up the challenge posed by the reanalysis of Verb-Object order as the basic one in the history of English; the question, which has been debated for over thirty years, is tackled here by combining a qualitative and quantitative investigation with current linguistic theories, shedding new light on the phenomenon.

It introduces new evidence in favour of a universal base order, by exploring the syntax of both Old English and Early Middle English and the information structural and prosodic properties of objects. It also considers the philological history of the texts examined, highlighting how this aspect should not be neglected in a diachronic linguistic study. As such, this book provides new data for scholars working in the field of English linguistics, as well as students and linguists interested in language change at the interface between syntax, information structure and prosody.

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Chiara De Bastiani studied English and German linguistics at the Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy, where she received her MA in 2015 with a thesis on the development of the definite determiner in the history of German. She carried out her PhD under a cotutelle-de-thèse agreement at the Ca’Foscari University of Venice and at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany, defending her thesis on the reanalysis of the Verb-Object (VO) word order as the basic one in the transition between Old and Middle English and the interaction between syntax, information structure and prosodic weight. Her current research focuses on the interaction of information structure and word order in the West Germanic languages.