Speculations on the syntax of subordinate clauses in Old English

This paper considers some issues that recent proposals made for the syntactic analysis of Old English main clauses raise for the analysis of subordinate clauses. Two possible approaches are explored, one involving a rich CP-structure as outlined by Rizzi (1997) and one based on proposals made by Bobaljik and Thrainsson (1998) with respect to the syntax of verb movement. The latter approach is shown to have the advantage of capturing main clause/subordinate clause asymmetries and of shedding light on some additional issues such as the syntax of conjoined clauses and the loss of verb movement in the history of English. The word order patterns found in the early stages of the history of English and the adequate structural analysis of these patterns have given rise to much discussion in the literature. In her seminal work on Old English (OE), van Kemenade (1987) argues that the main word order properties of OE can be analyzed in terms of proposals that have been made for the modern Germanic SOV/Verb Second languages like Dutch or German. Adapted to the standard X-bar-theoretic analysis of Dutch or German, van Kemenade's proposal means that OE has systematic verb movement to C and XP movement to (Spec, CP) in main clauses and that it has head-final projections below C (I and V) which give rise to verb-final word orders with finite verbs in subordinate clauses or with infinitives. Although van Kemenade's analysis accounts for many of the word order patterns found in OE, it has been shown in more recent work that a parallel treatment of OE and Dutch/German fails to capture certain properties of the syntax of OE in a satisfactory way. One of the problems a parallel analysis of OE and Dutch/German raises is that the V2 syntax of OE has some characteristics which cannot be found in the modern Germanic languages. First, as often observed in the *