Old Norse Influence on English Word Order and English Word Stress

抄録

This paper investigates why, how, and when the English language lost its left-prominent and morphologically governed stress pattern. The correlation found between the leveling of inflection and the fixing of word order suggests that English word order shifted from a subject-object-verb pattern to a subject-verb-object pattern during the transitional period from Old to Middle English. The correlation between word order and word stress, on the other hand, implies that the English word order became fixed during the Late Middle English period. To resolve this inconsistency, this paper takes into consideration the Old Norse influence on Old English and revisits the question of the leftward stress shift in Middle English. This revised view suggests the possibility that English word order became fixed during the transitional period from Old to Middle English because the rapid and drastic loss of inflectional endings influenced the Old English stress system as well.