Cloutier, Robert A. (2005) Review of Trips, Carola. (2002) From OV to VO in Early Middle English. English Language and Linguistics 9:1, 181-191. (original) (raw)

This book is a revision of Carola Trips' dissertation, submitted to the University of Stuttgart in 2001. The goal of the study is to show Scandinavian influence on the syntax of English by detailed analysis of the Ormulum, a twelfth-century text written in the East Midlands. Given this goal, the title is somewhat misleading. Although Trips mentions that her hypothesis is that the shift from OV to VO in English is due to Scandinavian influence, she focuses on finding evidence of other cases of Scandinavian influence rather than the actual shift from OV to VO. Her assumption is that finding evidence of Scandinavian influence on Middle English syntax in general will prove that the shift in English from OV to VO is also due to this Scandinavian influence, but this of course may not necessarily be the case. Despite the fact that language contact plays an important role in Trips' hypothesis, the book is strikingly lacking in discussion of literature on this topic, such as , , and other works concerned with formulating general tendencies and principles of linguistic borrowing.