Abstract
In the literature, it has often been argued that the change of the word order from Object-Verb to Verb-Object occurred around 1200 in English. But in the case of object pronouns, the former order still survived after that time and disappeared during the ENE period. The present paper is an attempt to study this history under Chomsky's (1993)Minimalist Approach.
I first show that ME object pronouns in the OV pattern were clitics. I claim that they overtly moved as DP to [Spec, AGRoP] to have their Case feature checked against the Case feature of a verb adjoined to AGRo, and then moved as Do and left-adjoined to the complex VAGRo-T-AGRs. Assuming that their Case feature was strong, I argue that the Case-checking was possible because verbs overtly moved to AGRo in ME. Then I claim that the loss of overt V-raising in ENE made such Case-checking impossible, and thus the order 'object pronoun+V' disappeared.
