Just a question, since my knowledge on this subject is very, very limited, but is it possible that the syntactic changes could be accounted for by a single parameter?
From what I recall, _The Atoms of Language_ makes the case that English went from SOV to SVO because a style in which very short sentences could be uttered in SVO arose and became popular, and within a fairly short period of time the L1 learners of English were mostly hearing SVO during their early years, so as they matured the head directionality parameter was set contrary to their parents. As I recall the book had some evidence to support this, but I can't speak to the quality of it. I'm also not sure how that would work with the antisymmetry proposal (which nicely explains other phenomena).
I haven't read the Atoms of Language but this sounds plausible and is if I remember correctly, more or less, what is believed to have happened. The diachronic study of english from say 900 to 1300, shows a language undergoing drastic changes such as the loss of inflections, grammatical gender, and adoption of north germanic (danish) words and later norman french ones. The idea is that original SOV speakers of saxon were put under the heavy influence of the SVO languages of the danes and later (post 1066 - battle of hastings) that of the SVO normans. It would make sense, especially since even OE was not a truly pure SOV language and allowed a much freer word order due to the inflection system, which upon dying out forced word order to take on a much stricter form.
As an interesting side note to show just how big of a hack mixed up jumble of everything modern english is, the usage of the verb do, in elliptical sentences and questions such as "do you want some coffee?", is very rare in indo-european languages (only found in celtic langs such as irish) and thought to have been picked up during the time in which saxon speakers and celts were sharing the same island.
I find this proposal an interesting thought experiment, for sure, but replacing all the vocabulary except the grammatical words seems more likely to me than replacing just the grammatical words and the grammar and retaining all the other vocabulary. Are there any other cases of the grammatical words being replaced while the rest of the vocab was left intact?
The fact that there was so much and such dramatic change happening that either of those possibilities are reasonable suggests to me that we're not going to get a definitive conclusion anytime soon.
Numerous parameters in the sense in which Baker is using them in _Atoms of Language_ changed between Old English and early Modern English. The loss of V2 is controlled by the V-to-T parameter and T-to-C parameter, the loss of head-final VPs is a separate parameter, and so on. [Source: I'm a working linguist.]
So what would you say the odds are of fundamental grammatical words and particles changing (leaving the bulk vocabulary alone) versus several large syntactic changes on this order? My armchair understanding is that the later is a lot more likely.
Well some of those changes are not reflected in Scandinavian in general (many Scandinavian dialects have V-to-T, some have V2), so I'm not sure if it's actually relevant to the authors' hypothesis. But some of those changes also happened _in_ Scandinavian in recorded history. So the probability of these changes is relatively high given a 500-year span.
Borrowing "fundamental grammatical words and particles" (I'd go with "functional elements") is common too (the French of Prince Edward Island French is a famous example). That English has Scandinavian functional elements is uncontroversial, and previously was taken as evidence for contact, not descent.
Here's what I see as the facts underlying their claim. English went from a OV, V-to-T-to-C (thereby, V2) language to a VO language with no verb raising, in which it is similar to Scandinavian. I don't see how that's inconsistent with contact.
Thanks for clarifying this for me! I wish there had been a linguistics department at the school I went to, I'm sure I would have minored in it instead of philosophy.
From what I recall, _The Atoms of Language_ makes the case that English went from SOV to SVO because a style in which very short sentences could be uttered in SVO arose and became popular, and within a fairly short period of time the L1 learners of English were mostly hearing SVO during their early years, so as they matured the head directionality parameter was set contrary to their parents. As I recall the book had some evidence to support this, but I can't speak to the quality of it. I'm also not sure how that would work with the antisymmetry proposal (which nicely explains other phenomena).