A Quantitative Analysis of the Loss of V2 in the History of English

Recent work (Kroch and Taylor (1997) (henceforth K&T (1997)); Kroch, Taylor and Ringe (1997)) (henceforth KTR (1997)) has shown that the two dialects of Middle English differed in the way they implemented the verb second (V2) constraint. In the south, V2 was observed to be of the IP-V2 type (the type found in modern Yiddish and Icelandic) whereas in the north, it was of the CP-V2 type (the type found in German, Dutch and the modern mainland Scandinavian languages). Another well known fact is that English lost V2 at some point in its history. On the basis of a study of a northern and a southern text, KTR (1997) suggest that this began with the extensive contact between northern and southern speakers, which led to considerable mixture of some features in both the dialects, in particular the V2 constraint. Furthermore, once developed in contact, the mixed language was picked up by children, and as a case of grammar competition (Kroch (1994)), subsequently evolved in a way that drove out the syntactically more marked option (V2) over a period of time. This paper traces the behavior of Middle English V2 from 1350 to 1500. Unlike previous studies, this paper is based on a larger number of texts (31 texts). The analysis of the data presented here shows that with respect to the implementation of the V2 constraint, there are notably distinct patterns observed in the southern region as a whole, thus necessitating its division into two subregions – one comprising the extreme south and the west midlands, and the other comprising the east midlands. I argue that the description in KTR (1997) about the nature of language contact between the northerners and southerners and its effect on verb second in the dialects of late Middle English can, in fact, be said to hold only for the north and east midlands, and that the changes in the V2 patterns observed in the south and west midlands must have been triggered by independent linguistic and/or social factors. Section 2 gives a brief description of the verb second constraint and of the two different ways in which it was implemented in early Middle English.