Grammar competition and word order in a northern early middle english text

Abstract

The Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians manuscript of Cursor Mundi and the Northern Homilies, a northern Middle English text from the early 14th century, contains unprecedentedly high frequencies of matrix verb-third and embedded verb-second word orders with subject–verb inver-sion. I give a theoretical account of these word orders in terms of a grammar, the ‘CM grammar’, which differs minimally in its formal description from regular verb-second grammars, but captures these unusual word orders through addition of a second preverbal A′ -projection. Despite its flex-ibility, the CM grammar did not spread through the English-speaking population. I discuss the theoretical consequences of this failure to spread for models of grammar competition where fitness is tied to parsing success, and discuss prospects for refining such models.