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OV–VO in English and the role of case marking in word order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2005

THOMAS McFADDEN
THOMAS McFADDEN
Affiliation:
University of Stuttgart
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Abstract

It is shown that the connection posited by Roberts (1997) between the loss of case marking and the shift from OV to VO in English is contradicted by the facts of English and the other Germanic languages. It is argued that this failure is not the result of an incorrect handling of the syntactic or morphological details, but of the way that the proposal straddles the syntax–morphology interface. Parallels are explored with research on verb raising and agreement, and it is proposed that, in order to be more than a descriptive generalization, the claim that some morphological property has a syntactic effect must be couched in terms that both the morphology and the syntax can refer to in a principled way.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , May 2005 , pp. 63 - 82
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2005

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Footnotes

Thanks to audiences at BLS 29 and the 2003 Conference on Comparative Diachronic Syntax, Wim van der Wurff, Ann Taylor, Tony Kroch, Dave Embick, and especially an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and criticisms.