Studies on the establishment of the SVO order in English have so far pointed to many factors, both internal and those having the source outside the language structures. Among possible external influences, medieval contacts with Scandinavian languages have been mentioned as providing an important early input to the English language (e.g. McWhorter 2002). The contact situation between the Anglian and Scandinavian populations at that time is said to have substantially contributed to the erosion of inflections. This morphological change, especially the attrition of cases on NPs (cf. Iglesias-Rabade 2003: 86), occurring first in northern dialects, has been proposed as one of the causes for the gradual emergence of the prevalent SVO order (cf. Fischer et al. 2000:173).
The present paper is part of my doctoral research, in which the role of Anglo-Scandinavian language contacts is measured against the changing morpho-syntactic conditions in English at early stages of its development. My earlier analysis of data from two parsed corpora of Old (YCOE) and Middle (PPCME2) English already revealed that both the loss of inflections and a particularly high preference for SVO converged in one dialect, viz. the Scandinavian-influenced North; the latter also seemed to develop faster in the areas affected by the contact (Czerniak 2011). However, when dealing with (diachronic) corpora, other potential factors affecting the distribution of the SVO order have to be considered, notably the presence of translations as well as the uneven distribution of texts in dialect samples with respect to different genres and distinct sub-periodisations. Subsequent analysis of the data has allowed to rank these factors on a scale of importance, which reveals an interesting fluctuation of values in dialect sets corresponding to the areas of Scandinavian influence. The statistical tool of coefficient of variation has been used to control and interpret the level of dispersion of the investigated feature in the sets.
PPCME2: Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (2nd edition) (Kroch & Taylor 2000)
YCOE: York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003)
Czerniak, I. 2011. 'Anglo-Scandinavian language contacts and word order shift in early English', in J. Fisiak & M. Bator (eds) Foreign Influences on Medieval English (Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature vol. 28), Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, (139–154).
Fischer, O., A. van Kemenade, W. Koopman, W.van der Wurff. 2000. The syntax of Early English. CUP.
Iglesias-Rábade, L. 2003. Handbook of Middle English: Grammar and Texts. (LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 05). Muenchen: LINCOM GmbH.
McWhorter, J. H. 2002. ‘What happened to English?’ (Diachronica 19:2).