Investigating the instability of the verb second phenomenon in English: A multifactorial approach to language change

This thesis explores the instability of the ‘verb second’ (V2) phenomenon in historical English texts, from a multifactorial perspective that considers the nuances of change in its structure and use over time. It analyses the interaction of a number of grammatical, discourse-related, and sociohistorical factors and their impact on the use of V2 word order from a parsed corpus-based lens, and a case study of Geoffrey Chaucer’s prose works. While there has been a wealth of scholarship that has contributed heavily to the understanding of how and why the V2 phenomenon declined in frequency across the history of English, specific examination of cases of V2 within their textual and non-textual environments is required, particularly related to the texts’ type, dialect, and rhetoric/argumentation in late medieval English. To understand why language users select varying types of verb-movement, we must appeal to the interaction between interfaces of linguistic domains (syntax, morphology, and information structure), the sociohistorical context of the time (dialect variation and language contact), as well as the culture of textual practices in the medieval period (provenance, author, and text-type). I highlight this interaction via three analysis chapters. Chapter 3 shows how cases of V2 that counter the general trend in Old English can be explained by the presence or absence of syntactic and information-structural pressures in specific sentences. Chapter 4 investigates these unexpected patterns of V2 further, by exploring the interaction of grammatical (i.e. type of subject, verb and initial constituent) and sociohistorical variables (i.e. dialect and provenance of the text) in late medieval English, a period of instability for the phenomenon. It also estimates the extent of Norse influence on V2 syntax following language contact with English, narrowing down the analysis to specific syntactic contexts. Finally, Chapter 5 presents a case study on the frequent use of V2 in Chaucerian prose works with different types of discourse, by considering the referential status of the sentence, as well as the origin of the texts and their author. These lines of inquiry combine to provide a refined picture of the stability of V2 usage in medieval England, and can be adapted to explain why syntactic change begins cross-linguistically.