Whether judged by the amount of intrinsic interest, the number of knock-on effects, or the sheer volume of scholarly work devoted to it, it seems safe to say that one of the major issues in English historical syntax is the shift from object–verb (OV) to verb–object (VO) order. Over the last three decades in particular, a large body of literature has grown up that has resulted in an increasingly detailed picture of this change. No doubt in part because the recent introduction of electronic corpora has provided a boost to data-oriented work, the popularity of this change shows no imminent signs of abating. Evidence for the continuing popularity of this topic was demonstrated at two conferences held at the University of Leiden Centre for Linguistics in 2003 (the second Holland–York Symposium on the History of English Syntax in April 2003, and the Conference on Comparative Diachronic Syntax in August 2003). Although neither of the meetings had the shift from OV to VO in English as a special theme, the conference programmes together included no fewer than eight papers on the topic. Seven of these can be found in this special issue, which aims to illuminate selected aspects of the alternation between OV and VO order in the history of English; the collection of articles is rounded off by a review of a recent monograph on the subject.

This article presents a novel ‘Kaynian’ analysis of Old and Middle English (OE and ME) word-order patterns in terms of which the patterns attested at the various stages of OE and ME are analysed as the output of a single grammar which, however, permits restricted types of variation. We propose that the West Germanic-like OE word orders were derived via the application of two types of ‘large XP’ movement – VP raising to SpecvP and vP raising to SpecTP – which are in fact pied-piping operations: in both cases, a DP contained within VP and vP – the object and the subject respectively – constitutes the actual Goal of movement, with the larger structure simply being pied piped along. Orders unlike West Germanic in both OE and ME, and synchronic variation more generally, are shown to be derived from the side-by-side availability in the OE and ME grammar of pied piping and ‘stranding’, and the word-order changes that occurred in ME are analysed as the consequence of a reanalysis of the ever more liberal ‘stranding’-permitting pied-piping grammar as one which specifically targets DPs.

Based on the occasional presence of personal pronoun objects and particles to the right of the nonfinite verb, Pintzuk (1999) argues that we must allow VO phrase structure in Old English as well as OV phrase structure. This article shows that personal pronoun objects and particles follow the nonfinite verb often enough to indeed assume VO as a genuine option. During the Old English period there is a significant increase in absolute as well as relative frequency. A quantitative analysis reveals that the relevant cases are found particularly often in coordinate contexts (pronouns) and ACI constructions (particles).

It is shown that the connection posited by Roberts (1997) between the loss of case marking and the shift from OV to VO in English is contradicted by the facts of English and the other Germanic languages. It is argued that this failure is not the result of an incorrect handling of the syntactic or morphological details, but of the way that the proposal straddles the syntax–morphology interface. Parallels are explored with research on verb raising and agreement, and it is proposed that, in order to be more than a descriptive generalization, the claim that some morphological property has a syntactic effect must be couched in terms that both the morphology and the syntax can refer to in a principled way.

Recent work on word-order change in the history of English has shown that late Middle English prose retains object–verb order as a productive option in contexts with an auxiliary and a quantified or negated object, and also in topicalization structures. In order to determine when these limited types of object–verb order became impossible, we have examined a collection of sixteenth-century prose texts. Our findings are that the patterns attested in late Middle English in fact continue until 1550, but then appear to dwindle away. We present the relevant object–verb data, discuss the reasons for the survival of the patterns found, provide an explanation for a difference at the level of detail between the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century data, and offer some suggestions about the reasons for the eventual loss of the structures in question.

This article presents arguments against a uniform head-initial analysis of Old English clause structure. Three analyses that have been proposed for Old English – variation in the headedness of underlying structure, uniform head-initial structure with object movement, and uniform head-initial structure with pied piping – are presented and evaluated in terms of the Old English data that they are able to account for. In particular, it is argued that the positions of verbs and their complements in constructions with quantified and nonquantified objects, pronominal objects, particles, and double objects cannot be derived without stipulations within uniform head-initial accounts, but can be derived unproblematically within a framework that incorporates a headedness parameter, requiring only a stipulation to block V–O–Aux order.

In this article I investigate the prosodic structure of verb–object sequences in three Old English metrical texts: Beowulf, Ælfric's Lives of Saints, and The Metres of Boethius. I show that while OV sequences are rarely separated by a line break in any of the texts, the prosodic structure of VO sequences is different in each text, with a high rate of separation of the verb and object in Beowulf, followed by the Metres with less separation, and finally the Lives of Saints with less again. I relate these facts to the ongoing change in headedness in the VP that has been claimed to begin in the Old English period. I take a separated verb–object sequence to indicate a postposed object, and thus the fall in the frequency of separation across the texts indicates a fall in the proportion of VO sequences that are derived by postposition, with a concomitant increase in base-generated VO order.

This programmatic article suggests that crucial aspects of syntactic change in the history of English derive from the resetting of a single parameter, the pied piping parameter. Whereas Old English (and the Modern Continental West Germanic languages) treats VP material individually, yielding characteristic patterns of object, particle, and verb placement, Modern English treats the VP as a collective, moving it to a position to the left of certain ‘low’ adverbs and adverbials. The shift from individual to collective movement is described in detail, with its repercussions on the position of the verb, its object(s), and the verbal particle. The emergence of a zero reflexive and the development of have as the exclusive perfect auxiliary are suggested to be long-term effects of the shift from individual to collective movement.