Much of the rearrangement of the Latin syntax by Notker Labeo in his classroom translation/commentaries is done according to a pedagogic principle called the ordo naturalis, which prescribes an SVO word order. A theoretical discussion of the ordo naturalis is preserved in a tenth-century treatise composed at St. Gall, and its practical application is found throughout Europe in the form of glosses and construe marks. My analysis shows that Notker varied the traditional and prescribed “natural order” according to the passage at hand, taking into consideration the level of textual difficulty and pedagogic relevance of the passage as well as the text-building strategies of the original. In a few instances Notker even sprinkled his personal variant of ordo naturalis with OHG word order. Notker expanded upon and modified tradition with his own pedagogic common sense, thus tailoring his teaching materials to the needs of the St. Gall pupils.

I examine the development of for to and for in several stages of English. I argue that as prepositions grammaticalize, they acquire certain intrinsic features and occupy special positions. In Old English, for to is a P, related to Case, and has some future sense (through an extension of the locative meaning). Verbs do not subcategorize for complements with for (yet), however. In early Middle English, for to is used to introduce a complement with future meaning. Now, for (to) occupies C, which I assume is universally true for purpose/future indicators. In late Middle English, the situation solidifies, and more verbs select a complement with for (to) indicating purpose and futurity. In Early Modern English, for to disappears, but for separated from to takes over its function of introducing purposive adjuncts and future complements.

In this paper I examine the effect of the semantic relationship between an attributive genitive and its head noun on the relative ordering of the two during the ENHG period. Data were collected from five sources, all written between 1500 and 1550 by men who were natives of the city Nuremburg. Since it has been shown that personal genitives more frequently preceded the head noun, while nonpersonal genitives more often followed, the data were broken down into those two categories. It is shown that personal subjective and objective genitives are more likely to follow the head noun than personal genitives in general, while personal possessive and relational genitives are more likely to precede.