English Historical Syntax

This course deals with syntactic change in the history of English (in comparison, in particular, with German and French). Phenomena to be discussed will include the loss of inflectional paradigms, the rise of auxiliaries and modals, the loss of auxiliary selection in the perfect  tense, the change from OV to VO word order, the loss of verb movement  and the development of do-support, and the partial loss of the  verb-second constraint. Students should have interest in formal syntactic descriptions.