Examination of the Latin Influence on Verb Word Orders in Main Clauses in the Old English Orosius(Abstract)

Verb-second word order is theoretically assumed to be derived by the movement of main verbs in a verb phrase (VP) to the head of a complementiser phrase (CP).Old English (OE) is a verb-second language as are several other Germanic languages.As evident in Modern German main clauses, the typical verb-second word order is very rigid.While the typical word order in the OE main clause is subject to the verb-second word order, a few exceptional word orders such as verb-final are observed especially in Early Old English (EOE) literature.The extent to which Latin influenced the verb word orders in EOE prose remains controversial.One hypothesis is that a word order such as