Verb particles and OV/VO in the history of English

Verb particles (e.g. up, out, off, down, away) are a well‐known and well studied feature of English and of Germanic languages in general. Nevertheless, the functional and categorial status of English verb particles remains debated, and, especially in the diachronic literature on OV/VO word‐order change, this question is typically avoided entirely. This lack of precision about the nature of verb particles is surprising, given the central role attributed to verb particles as diagnostic elements for basic word order. We motivate an analysis of English verb particles as (optionally) projecting intransitive prepositions which function as secondary predicates. In relation to the OV/VO issue, we claim that, although there is a statistically strong cross‐Germanic correlation between the position of verb particles and verb complements, the position of verb particles is not a diagnostic for OV/VO order. To support this claim, we will show that there is no one‐to‐one correspondence a) between Prt–V surface word order and an underlying OV grammar, or b) between V–Prt surface word order and an underlying VO grammar. Moreover, it will be shown that OV order with DP‐objects in early Middle English is highly discourse‐sensitive, suggesting that OV order with DP‐objects is not determined by phrase structure, but by discourse‐sensitive scrambling from a VO base.