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Developments in English Historical Morpho-Syntax
Edited by Claudia Claridge and Birte Bös
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 346] 2019
► pp. 223–246

From time-before-place to place-before-time in the history of English

A corpus-based analysis of adverbial clusters

In Present-day English, place adverbials tend to precede adverbials of time in clusters (cf. Hasselgård, 1996). In this paper, this word order preference is investigated from a diachronic perspective. The corpus-based analysis shows that the preferred order changes from time-before-place in Old English to place-before-time towards the end of the Middle English period. In a number of binary logistic regressions this study explores which factors might motivate these preferences respectively. The obligatoriness of the adverbials and their realization form emerge as two crucial factors. Their effect can be related to the proximity principle (cf. Hasselgård, 2010), the principle of end weight, and the principle of given-before-new. Comparing the different periods of English from Old English to Early Modern English, this paper shows how the increasingly fixed position of the lexical verb can be linked to the reversal of the ordering preference from time-before-place to place-before-time.

Keywords: word order, adverbial, proximity principle, information structure
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Factors that motivate the order of adverbials in clusters – previous research and annotation of the data
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Results of the analyses
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Complements and their proximity to the lexical verb
    • 5.2Weight, realization form and the given-before-new principle
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 27 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.346.11chr
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