抄録
This study demonstrates that Preferred Argument Structure holds for the early stages of English. Preferred Argument Structure aims to uncover preferred discourse configurations of arguments over other configurations of grammatically possible alternatives. Grammatical roles A, S, O and Oblique are examined and found to be systematically ordered from the viewpoint of referential forms and information status at each synchronic stage-i. e. A<S<O<OBL-which means that the more to the left a role is situated, the less likely it is to realize a lexical new mention. This implicational hierarchy has gradually been shaped over time. I argue that such form-information combinations have consistently evolved in the shaping of grammatical systems despite the different grammatical details in the earlier stages of English.
