Motivations and Variations of Old English Verb-First Declaratives

Motivations and Variations of Old English Verb-First Declaratives

  This study purports to explicate the semantic and syntactic motivations of Old English V-1 declaratives and illuminate underlying factors responsible for their textual variations. In terms of the V-2 hypothesis of Old English, V-1 is anomalous, in that a declarative main clause begins with a finite verb rather than a topic. V-1 declaratives are semantically justified not only to highlight a finite verb but also to achieve coherence involving causal connectivity such as presupposition, maintained situation, consequence, explanation, and cause, without an explicit connective marker. Semantic uniqueness and relevant syntactic evidence make the assumption based on the split CP hypothesis tenable that a V-1 declarative main clause selects the highest functional head Force strong enough to force verb movement. The semantic and syntactic arguments suggested here further explain the distributional variations of V-1 declaratives between The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. Compared with V-1 declaratives in the former text, those in the latter exhibit a much lower frequency and co-occurrence restrictions concerning sentence adverbs. The discrepancies largely result from the development of sentence adverbs functioning as a connective in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. Those adverbs substitute for V-1 declaratives in connecting clauses and representing causal links.