Part of
Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact: Essays in honour of Ans van KemenadeEdited by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 243] 2017
► pp. 311–333
This article examines the interplay between information structure and word order in Old English separable complex verbs, the precursors of Present-Day English Verb-Particle Combinations (VPCs). Studies of Present-Day English VPCs (e.g. Dehé 2002; Gries 1999, 2002, 2003) and Middle English and early Modern English VPCs (Elenbaas 2013) have shown that the choice of word order is influenced by information structural factors. The findings in this article for Old English VPCs with up and out indicate that the word order variation in Old English VPCs is more morpho-syntactic than information-structural in nature.