Adverbials and inversion in early english scientific writing

Abstract

English shifted from being basically verb final in Old English (Traugott 1992: 274) to verb non-final from Middle English onwards (Fischer 1992: 371). From a diachronic standpoint, however, Old English can feature inversion whenever an object, an adverbial or a PP is fronted, while in Middle English it is exclusively witnessed when a wh-element or a negative constituent occupies first position (van Kemenade 1987: 180). Interestingly enough, recent research demonstrates that inversion after fronted adverbials is found in the early Modern English period (Nevalainen 1997: 213).