The Verb-Second Phenomenon in the Old English Bible

Abstract

The article investigates the incidence of verb-second (V-2) main declarative clauses in the Old English translation of the book of Genesis as an example case of potential representativeness of a translated text for the purposes of syntactic investigations. We explore whether constituent order patterns found in the analyzed text conform with the rules and tendencies described for Old English in general and try to determine whether the Latin original has an influence on the order of the target text. This is achieved by working with a parallel corpus. In the analysis we consider a number of factors mentioned in the literature in connection with the V-2 phenomenon. The study shows that the researched text closely follows the tendencies identified in original Old English compositions and that the Latin influence on the translation is very limited. The findings and the developed methodology have implications for studies of both Old English and other Old Germanic languages since they enable the expansion of the corpora used in historical syntactic research.