Object Movement and Verb Movement in Early Modern English

This paper presents the evidence for a rule of object shift in Middle and Early Modern English, and shows what the consequences of the existence of this rule are for (a) the English pronominal system, (b) the analysis of Scandinavian object shift, (c) the historical development of English. In Section 1 we present the basic facts about Scandinavian object shift, drawing on Holmberg (1986, 1991) and Vikner (1989, 1994). We sketch an analysis of this phenomenon which treats object shift as A-movement of the pronoun. This approach makes the right connection between object shift and verb movement in terms of the theory of locality in Chomsky (1993). Section 2 discusses Early Modern English and shows that, modulo independent differences concerning verb movement, object shift here exactly parallels MSc. Section 3 gives a more detailed version of the analysis. Here we also give several arguments against a head-movement approach to object shift.