Object-verb order in early sixteenth-century English prose: an exploratory study

Recent work on word-order change in the history of English has shown that late Middle English prose retains object-verb order as a productive option in contexts with an auxiliary and a quantified or negated object, and also in topicalization structures. In order to determine when these limited types of object-verb order became impossible, we have examined a collection of sixteenth-century prose texts. Our findings are that the patterns attested in late Middle English in fact continue until 1550, but then appear to dwindle away. We present the relevant object-verb data, discuss the reasons for the survival of the patterns found, provide an explanation for a difference at the level of detail between the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century data, and offer some suggestions about the reasons for the eventual loss of the structures in question.