Object preposing in 15th century Drenthe

Contrary to the findings of Thomas F. Shannon (2003) that pronominal objects canonically precede full noun phrase (NP) subjects in 16th-century Dutch literary corpora, an analysis of texts of judicial verdicts from Drenthe, a province speaking a Northeastern Dutch dialect, reveals a significant decrease during the 15th century in the scrambling of objects over subjects. The data examined are taken from samples for each decade from 1399 to 1518 & consist of all subordinate clauses containing a subject & an internal argument & all main clauses that additionally have the first position filled by an adverbial or one internal argument of a ditransitive construction. This discrepancy between the present study & Shannon's may be due to early development towards subject NP + object pronoun order in the Drenthe dialect, to conservatism in the dialects studied by Shannon, to genre-specific variation, &/or to possible leveling out of dialect variation in Shannon's data. Tables, Graphs, References. J. Hitchcock