Object-Verb Word Order in the History of English (or When Performance Word Order Affects)
- Autores: Javier Pérez Guerra
- Localización: Taking stock to look ahead: celebrating forty years of English studies in Spain / coord. por María Ferrández San Miguel, Claus Peter Neumann, 2018, ISBN 978-84-16723-51-5, págs. 225-234
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Whereas Verb-Object (VO) is the unmarked design of the predicate in Present-Day English clauses, in older stages of the development of English surface Object-Verb (OV) was the preferred option at least in certain syntactic contexts. This chapter deals with OV in Modern English and, from a corpus-based perspective, explores a number of variables that may account for such a marked alternative. The data are retrieved from the electronic Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. In an attempt to check whether the OV patterns are also systematic or not in the later periods, the data are thoroughly revised and analysed by paying attention to variables linked to the linguistic design of the predicates, the structure and semantics of the objects and other textual and discourse-related factors. This study shows that the text type in which the OV example is attested and the structure of the object play a major role in the model.
