The History of Verb Movement in English

Abstract

This paper is a discussion of Infl features and V movement from a historical perspective, using the minimalist framework, and a note on nominative Case assignment. We first demonstrate that the finite Infl carries [+Tense, +Agr, +Mood] for earliar English, but [+Tense, +Agr] for contemporary English, due to the loss of subjunctive morphology. Additionally, more drastic reinterpretations occurred in the subjunctive and imperative —from [+Tense, +Agr, +Mood] to [+Agr] and from [+Tense, +Agr, +Mood] to [+Tense], respectively. [+Agr]for the subjunctive is a dependent Case assigner which must be activated by another governor under the head government, while the auxiliary do is a dummy [+Tense] supporter in the imperative.
We can then explain V movement in terms of the strength of — not AgrP but —‘nonsplit Infl’ by counting the number of positive Infl features. The more, the stronger. Looking over the historical data, we confirm the facts of V movement primarily in Early Modern English.