Chapter published in:
Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade
Edited by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 243] 2017
► pp. 57–77

Chapter 4
Conditional inversion and types of parametric change

| University of Cambridge | Stellenbosch University
| University of Cambridge

We document a case of change from a mesoparameter to a microparameter to a nanoparameter involving Conditional Inversion (CI) in English. What has changed since Old English is the range of elements affected by T-to-C movement, and how it relates to other forms of head-movement into the C-field. In Old English, CI was part of the verb-second (V2) system. English lost V2 in the 15th century, but “residual V2”, including CI, survived. In the Early Modern period, movement of lexical verbs to T was lost; from this period on, only auxiliaries undergo CI, again in line with interrogative inversion. CI applied to all auxiliaries, until the mid-19th century. In contemporary English, CI is restricted to had, should and were.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.CI in Contemporary English
  • 2. Pre-20th-century Modern English
  • 3.Early Modern English
  • 4.Old and Middle English
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.04rob
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