Wednesday, May 03, 2006
‘Inflection and Movement in Old English’
From the author’s personal website(pdf):
‘Inflection and Movement in Old English’
Elly van Gelderen
In this paper, I focus on Old English verbal inflection in relation to (b) and (c) in Beowulf, The
Junius Manuscript and The Exeter Book. Many of the arguments hold for other Germanic
languages as well. I show that, even though the inflection is rich in Old English, the language has some
reduced inflection when the verb is in second position. This is unexpected but in accordance with
Chomsky (1995) who does not connect morphological strength with the feature strength that triggers
movement. I argue this reduction indicates that, in the `normal’ Old English clause, agreement is
checked inside VP but that if verbs move to second position, the checking may occur in C resulting
in incomplete agreement. Following Kiparsky (1995), I claim that Old English has limited Verbsecond
because the C position is not generally available. In addition, there is no evidence for AGR
and T positions and therefore, Old English is a problem for Bobaljik & Jonas (1996). I suggest that
positional, rather than morphological, evidence triggers Functional Categories.