In Present Day English, certain adverbs such as never or always generally occupy a preverbal position (cf. 1a below) whereas a postverbal position was common in earlier stages in the history of English (cf. 1b from Late Middle English).
(1) a. *I did never this knight any harm.
a'. I never did this knight any harm.
b. I dede never this knight no harme (CMMALORY,202.3228)
The word order change illustrated in (1) has long been observed (cf. e.g. Ellegård 1953:180ff. for some discussion) and it has gained particular prominence in the generative literature in the context of the discussion of the cross-linguistic variation in V-to-I movement, (1b) being analyzed as a case of V-to-I movement and (1a) as the absence thereof. However, apart from Ellegård's (1953) brief discussion of never in the 15th and 16th centuries, there is very little descriptive work tracing the details of this change. The aim of this paper is to help remedy this gap by examining the development in the distribution of finite verbs with respect to adverbs in Late Middle English and Early Modern English on the basis of an analysis of the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC). Apart from tracing the general diachronic development of adverb placement, we will also consider potential factors influencing this development such as clause type (main, conjoined main, subordinate), adverb type, subject type (nominal, pronominal) or register (correspondence, other text types).