From Object Movement to Object Shift: The Development of Object-oriented Floating Quantifiers with Full DPs and Pronouns in the History of English

Abstract

This study investigates the historical development of Object-oriented Floating Quantifiers (OFQs) in English from Old English to Present-day English, focusing on their distribution with full-DP objects and pronouns. Through a comprehensive corpus analysis, we demonstrate that while Old English exhibited multiple word order patterns for OFQs with both types of objects, similar to other Germanic languages, Present-day English shows a restricted distribution where OFQs can only follow object pronouns. The investigation reveals that OFQs with full-DP objects were lost during the Middle English period, coinciding with the change from OV to VO word order. In contrast, OFQs with object pronouns developed a new pattern through the emergence of Object Shift in Late Middle English and Early Modern English. Working within the minimalist framework, we argue that these changes can be explained through a licensing condition requiring an FQ to enter into a Multiple Agree relation with a functional head and its host DP within the same phase domain. This analysis accounts for both the loss of certain OFQ patterns and the emergence of new ones, demonstrating how changes in core syntactic properties can lead to systematic transformations in grammar.