My dissertation undertakes a complete study of the stress patterns, syntactic construction, and rhetorical style of hypermetric verse in Germanic alliterative poetry. This project allows me to fill a gap in the study of Germanic meter while simultaneously investigating the connection between metrical and literary scholarship. Hypermetric meter…

An analysis of indirect object passives in English and their development from Late Old English and Early Middle English suggests that their existence is related to the development of double object constructions. As long as the dative and accusative cases had not merged, neither pronominal nor nominal indirect objects required a preposition;…

This paper addresses itself to the question of why the English language should have levelled almost all of its inflections, and what the relationship is between the breakdown of the case system and the rise of fixed word-order, prepositional phrases, and verb periphrases. The explanation proposed for the phenomenon of syntactic drift is considered…