Foreign Influences on Medieval English

The current paper sheds light on one of the most significant changes in the English language occurring at the early stages of its development. An attempt will be made to trace the emergence of rigid SVO order in Early English, happening as a consequence of overt morphological simplification, which in turn was instigated by medieval Anglo-Scandinavian language contacts. The results of my searches through the prose parsed corpora of Old (YCOE1) and Middle (PPCME2) suggest a receding pattern for the SOV and an increasingly prevailing tendency towards SVO word order in the areas most open to language contact. However, some additional statistical calculations are necessary to fully account for the nature of the change.