# English Word Order



## Darunia

Hello, I'm just curious about this and maybe someone here knows, does English get its word order from French? I'm thinking that it must be so, and that it must date to the Norman invasion. Not in all examples, to be sure, but I've compared it to German, which is a close proximity in the Anglo-Saxon line, and it's much closer to French. See how the parts correspond below:


*I heard* _my father_ *walk * _by_ *the door.*

*J'ai entendu* _mon pere_ *marcher*_devant_ *la porte.*

*    Subject        Predicate    Verb      Preposition   Noun*


To be sure there are some instances where the order isn't identical, but in many it is. If I am wrong, then can someone else shed some light on this for me?


*I'm going* _to the store_ *to buy* _ something._

*Je vais     *_au magasin_ *pour acheter* _quelque chose._


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## Joannes

(I'm sorry, I'm going to use some fancy words because it's shorter. I don't know to what extent you're familiar with this kind of terminology but people who are interested in the word order of languages very often have quite an idea about grammatical terminology as well  - Do feel free to ask for explanation if there's something you don't quite understand.)

The word order of English has often been connected to the case syncretism that the language suffered. What used to be marked morphologically by nominative case in Old English (which had V2 or SOV order, like present day German and Dutch), is (standardly) marked in a syntactic way by being to the left of the verb in Present-Day English. The syntactic function of what used to be marked by accusative case in older stages, on the other hand, nowadays can be inferred from the position to the right of the verb.

Although case syncretism may be a sufficient condition, it isn't a necessary one. Still, as it has been showed that the earliest uses of SVO order in English are favoured when subject and object are morphologically ambiguous, case syncretism does appear to have been the causal factor for English SVO fixation. (Dutch, which also lost its case system, can offer proof for the evolution to a more fixed word order. Dutch didn't quite fixate SVO order though, but the language still has more morphology than English, and Dutch is in fact typologically rare in the respect of being a language which has (well, can have) SOV order (in subordinate clauses that is) but no case marking.)


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## berndf

I wouldn't think so. Much of the rigidity of today's English sentence structure developed during the modern English period. In early ModE, word orders which resemble much more that of German were fairly common. Sentences like
_To him I will bequeath my fortune._
_I hope this night my true love to see._
would not have been out of the ordinary.

In your example 


> *I'm going* _to the store_ *to buy* _something._


 the preposition _to_ in _to buy_ is not related to _pour_ in _pour acheter_ but has a Germanic origin. In Old English, _to buy_ had two infinitives, _bycġan _and _bycġanne _the former of which developed into the bare infinitive _buy_ and the later into the full infinitive _to buy_ with the preposition _to_ (which also appeared already in OE but was not mandatory there) compensating for the lost morphological distinction.

It might also serve as circumstantial evidence for a not too far reaching French influence on English word order that the SOV order in main (not only subordinate!) clauses which is very typical for Latin an has survived in French for pronoun objects (where case distinction is still present) like in _Je vais le lui dire_ has never made it into English.


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## Sepia

Darunia said:


> Hello, I'm just curious about this and maybe someone here knows, does English get its word order from French? I'm thinking that it must be so, and that it must date to the Norman invasion. Not in all examples, to be sure, but I've compared it to German, which is a close proximity in the Anglo-Saxon line, and it's much closer to French. See how the parts correspond below:
> 
> 
> *I heard* _my father_ *walk *_by_ *the door.*
> 
> *J'ai entendu* _mon pere_ *marcher*_devant_ *la porte.*
> 
> *Subject Predicate Verb Preposition Noun*
> 
> 
> To be sure there are some instances where the order isn't identical, but in many it is. If I am wrong, then can someone else shed some light on this for me?
> 
> 
> *I'm going* _to the store_ *to buy* _something._
> 
> *Je vais *_au magasin_ *pour acheter* _quelque chose._


 

It is even much closer to Danish and various other Germanic languages. Shouldn't really be a big surprise to anyone. 

Exceptions are sentences where you use "to do" - like in 

"Do you have a knife?"

In Ireland they often leav that out and say

"Have you a knife?"

Even closer to Danish:

"Har du en kniv?"

The same question in High German would be:

"Hast du ein Messer?" 
or formal third person speach: "Haben Sie ein Messer?"

Still the same word order. Even the second person verb is very similar to OE.

The same question in French would be a far cry from this. 

Besides you are talking about the Norman invasion - when EXACTLY do you mean? Are you at all sure they spoke French? (And why?). I do not know the historic facts of that area and the possible periods too well, but I know for sure that there are still a good deal of people in that part of France that speak Bretonic - that is a Celtic language, just like Irish.

Besides, the word order as you describe it

*Subject Predicate Verb Preposition Noun*

does not really convince me, anyway. The reason is simple and logical. Certain characteristics, like the word order preposition-noun are the same in all Indoeuropean languages that I have even the slightest knowledge of. That is probably why somebody called them PREpositions. The same goes for having the subject in front of the verb, when it is not a question. (With the exception of those languages where you can either leave the subject or the verb out). 

With this in mind, you tell me what you have got left to compose a different word order with.


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## natkretep

Sorry for resurrecting this old thread. Has anyone read John McWhorter's _Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue_? He suggests that it was the interaction between the Vikings (Norse speakers) and the English that led to the abandonment of the 'verb second' (V2) word order.

He also suggests that the rise of the use of _do _support (what he calls the 'meaningless _do_' - _do _you want this? you _do _not want this) arose out of the the Celtic speakers who spoke English as a kind of second language originally.


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## berndf

The loss of V2 as the basic structure of English declarative sentences (contrary to modern German and Dutch, there had always been exceptions in Old and Middle English) happened to late (15th century) to be due to direct Norse influence. It could only be a dialect contact phenomenon where northern, Old Norse-influenced dialectal structures entered the (southern) standard language. While being prima facie plausible the hypothesis completely lacks evidence to support it. A more reasonable explanation seems to me that it is a consequence of the loss of inflections that promotes a more rigid SVO order. Here, it is related to the loss of null expletive subjects which in itself is related to the loss of verb inflections*.

_Do_ as an auxiliary verb has a long History in Germanic languages. The weak preterite originated from (this can be regarded as consensus opinion today) an enclitic preterite form for do in PGmc, i.e. _he loved her_ originated from the structure _he love-did her_. In positive statements, the auxiliary _do _serves as en emphatic form (_He does love her!_). Though frowned upon in standard language, this is perfectly normal in many regional vernaculars in German as well. The expletive use in English (_when do you come?_ rather than _when commest thou?_) happened only during the early modern English period; much, much too late to have anything to do with Celtic influence. I haven't read that McWhorter's argument; but if it were constructed like all the other Celtic substratum/influence theories and French, English and other languages, its plausibility would mainly be based on the lack of evidence, either _pro_ or _con_. Many of these theories seem to on the argument _Here we have a spurious phenomenon; here we have a spurious explanation; sounds like a perfect match_.
____________________________________________________
*In German, expletive subjects are normally dropped to preserve V2 structure: _Es ist ihm kalt_ (_Es_ = expletive subject). With fronting of _ihm _the sentence becomes: _Ihm ist kalt_. Similar structures existed in Old and Middle English too and but in late Middle English, the time when the basic paradigm moved from V2 to SVO.


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## natkretep

Thanks, berndf.

Yes, I agree there's a link between inflection loss and the loosening of the V2 word order, but then the inflection loss itself is often linked to English-Norse pidginisation. 

McWhorter does not provide a lot of detailed evidence but he says that it will be in the language of the speakers of English as a second language which would therefore be automatically filtered out in all writing. He makes the same argument for the apparent sudden appearance of _do _support much later in time. He refers to DNA evidence that much of the 'English' population had Celtic links, indicating that the Celts lived among the Anglo-Saxons as subjugated people and were eventually absorbed into the community, but not before their Celtic-influenced version of English influenced the language in Britain. Their variety lacked prestige and was never represented in OE. He also suggests that linguists have not made the link because most linguists writing on the history of English were not familiar with Celtic languages.

He also has a kind of theory about why the Germanic branch is different from the other branches of Indo-European - this time, it's the Phoenicians possibly settling in Europe and therefore adjusting PGmc. But he does say that there is more conjecture here.


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## berndf

natkretep said:


> Yes, I agree there's a link between inflection loss and the loosening of the V2 word order, but then the inflection loss itself is often linked to English-Norse pidginisation.


If it is a pidginization then it is certainly due to the Norman invasion and the mass import of Anglo-French vocabulary and not due to mixture with Norse. The only loss of inflection we observe in the late OE/early ME period is due to phonetic development we observe in other West Germanic languages as well: the reduction of vowels in unstressed endings and subsequent loss vowel distinctions (merger into Schwa).


natkretep said:


> He makes the same argument for the apparent sudden appearance of _do _support much later in time.


Up to Early Modern English, the frequency of unmarked (i.e. non-emphatic) auxiliary _do _is comparable to that in other West Germanic vernaculars and, hence, inconspicuous. I am curious what period he has in mind for this "sudden appearance". Since the corpus of original manuscripts or inscriptions older than the 9th or 10th century is much to small for any meaningful statistics, the most relevant period (the centuries following the Anglo-Saxon conquest) remain completely in the dark.



natkretep said:


> Their variety lacked prestige and was never represented in OE.


This sounds suspiciously like the style of argument I caricatured above:_ There is no evidence whatsoever, hence you can't disprove it, hence it must be true._


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## fdb

Given the fact that there are virtually no Celtic loanwords in English (or shall we say: very, very few) all theories about Celtic influence on English syntax seem highly questionable.


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## natkretep

That is the mainstream view. Some scholars have said that scholars have been ignoring Celtic loan-words in English. Loreto Todd had an article in _English Today.

_I will try to look up McWhorter again later.


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## natkretep

The fuller account can be found in his 2007 book, _Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars_.

I'll just mention a few of his points. He mentions the consensus which links the loss of V2 to the erosion of verbal inflectional morphology, and concludes that these explanations lack explanatory power or falsifiability. He also mentions inflection loss in Mainland Scandinavian which did not result in the loss of V2.

He also mentions the new Celtists, and their work filtering into the mainstream:


> The arguments that Celtic was the source of _do-_support (Poussa 1990; Tristram 1997; White 2002), the -_ing_ gerund and progressive (Mittendorf and Poppe 2000; White 2002), and the Northern Subject Rule in which third-person plural is only marked when the verb and the pronoun - but not a full NP - are adjacent (yielding _They peel and boils them_ and _Birds flies_) (Klemola 2000) are likely to gain wider acceptance over time. (p. 89)


I suppose the 'sudden appearance' is not to do with the features not being around, but being to do with the re-emergence of written English after the Norman period, which allowed the tight grip of a standard form in writing to be abandoned.

On the relative lack of Celtic lexical influence in contrast to the Scandinavians, he says:


> The Scandinavians came to Britain, encountered a new language, and were immediately stuck with floundering about in a version of English that they - big surprise - decorated with words of their own where they could. Celts, original inhabitants who could go on speaking their native languages among themselves as they always had, regardless of the language the new invaders were gradually pressing into their world, got acquainted with the new tongue more gradually. (p. 90)


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## berndf

I find it a bit strange that to label the mainstream hypothesis as lacking _explanatory power and falsifiability _when the alternative hypothesis he proposes rest completely and exclusively on unattested phenomena. But well, when he says ..._are likely to gain wider acceptance over time _I take this to mean that he is proposing a research programme rather than a developed theory. As such it is interesting but nothing that could shake mainstream opinion as of now. The lack of apparent Celtic influence on English is perplexing phenomenon than certainly warrants more research. But if we want to link late ME V2 erosion to influence by a non-V2 language then French is again a more obvious candidate than Celtic. The exceptions to V2 syntax that existed already in OE could possibly be a more interesting phenomenon, if you wanted to trace possible Celtic influence; maybe, I don't know.

The increased use of _do_-support during the ME period (starting in the 14th century) without apparent emphatic meaning is in itself still inconspicuous. There are German vernaculars where this phenomenon is more wide-spread than in late ME (In Rhinelandish vernacular, e.g., _er tut das nicht brauchen _instead of _er braucht das nicht_ has all but lost its emphatic significance and is extremely wide-spread). The significant development is the grammaticalization of _do_-support that happened significantly later, notably after the erosion of V2 syntax.


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## natkretep

I think for the loss of V2, he might be thinking of Scandinavian rather than Celtic influence. For him, French influenced the more formal aspects of the language, especially the lexicon, rather than the grammar. There's apparently research on contact languages where the SVO pattern is considered universal.

The general thesis is that English stands apart from the other Germanic languages in the extent to which it has shed its Germanic features, much more than Afrikaans, and he's attempting to answer the question about what makes the situation of English so different from all the other Germanic languages. In the case of _do-_support, we have a situation where it is a requirement rather than an option in English interrogatives and negatives, and this is not the case in any other Germanic language.


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## berndf

natkretep said:


> I think for the loss of V2, he might be thinking of Scandinavian rather than Celtic influence.


I am a bit confused. Scandinavian languages did not lose V2 syntax. A fact that you noted yourself:





natkretep said:


> He also mentions inflection loss in Mainland Scandinavian which did not result in the loss of V2.


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## berndf

natkretep said:


> In the case of _do-_support, we have a situation where it is a requirement rather than an option in English interrogatives and negatives, and this is not the case in any other Germanic language.


This is indeed the crucial point which I mentioned before:


berndf said:


> The significant development is the grammaticalization of _do_-support that happened significantly later, notably *after the erosion of V2 syntax*.


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