Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Verb types and word order in Old
and Middle English non-coordinate
and coordinate clauses
Kristin Bech
University of Oslo
This paper focuses on the relation between word order, verb types and clause
types in Old and Middle English, with reference to the change of English
from a language with a verb-second constraint to a verb-medial language.
The word order patterns dicussed are the XVS, SVX and XSV patterns, and
the verb categories operated with are verbs with complement, verbs without
complement, copulas and existential verbs. A distinction is made between
coordinate clauses; i.e., clauses introduced by a coordinating conjunction, and
non-coordinate clauses. The results show that there is a difference between the
two clause types and between the word order patterns in the distribution of
verbs. Furthermore, there is a clear development from Old and Middle English
as regards verb distribution in the clause types and word order patterns, and
this development is especially noticeable in the XVS pattern. It may thus be
deduced that word order is not only determined on the basis of syntactic rules,
but is also related to the information content of the sentence. Consequently,
studying word order and word order change from a functional perspective is
highly relevant.
1. Introduction
The aim of this paper is to explore some verb types in Old and Middle English
declarative main clauses with the word order XVS, SVX and XSV. 1 I distinguish
between two types of main clauses: coordinate clauses (i.e., clauses introduced by
a coordinating conjunction, in most cases and and to some extent but) and noncoordinate
clauses. Through a study of the interrelation between the factors ‘type
of verb’, ‘type of clause’ and ‘word order’, I will attempt to show that different word
orders have different functions, that these functions may have changed in the
1. This paper is based on a section from my doctoral dissertation (Bech 2001). I would like to
thank the anonymous readers for this volume for relevant and helpful comments.