The Verbal Syntax of Old Spanish : A statistical analysis of

This paper is a quantitative study of the word order patterns in the Old Spanish text EI Libro del Caballero Zifar. In the past, many have argued against or in favor of categorizing O'Sp as a V2 language, but to my knowledge none have based such a claim on the findings of a statistical analysis of asp texts. In the essay, I compare 1000 clauses from this asp work of prose with 185 clauses from a similar Modem Spanish text. From this analysis I not only give a comprehensive description of the syntax of the asp of Zifar, but also observe that the word order patterns of Old and ModSp are for the most part identical. The only real difference between the two is the behavior of pronominal object clitics. There are only residual V2 effects in both asp and ModSp, thus I am able to conclude that neither is a proper V2 language in a strict sense of the term.