The book is concerned with the interaction of syntax information structure and prosody in the
history of English demonstrating this with a case study of object topicalization. The approach
is data-oriented using material from syntactically parsed digital corpora of Old Middle and
Early Modern English which serve as a solid foundation for conclusions.The use of object
topicalization underwent a sharp decline from Old English until today. In the present volume a
basic prosodic well-formedness condition the Clash Avoidance Requirement is identified as the
main factor for this change. With the loss of V2-syntax object topicalization led more easily
to cases in which two focalized phrases the topicalized object and the subject are adjacent.
The two focal accents on these phrases would produce a clash thus violating the Clash
Avoidance Requirement. In order to circumvent this the use of topicalization in critical cases
is avoided. The Clash Avoidance Requirement is highly relevant also today as experimental data
on English and German show. Further the Clash Avoidance Requirement helps to explain the
well-known syntactic structure of the left periphery in Old English. An analysis positing two
subject positions is defended in the study. The variation of these subject positions is shown
to depend not on pronominal vs. lexical status of the subject but on information structural
properties.
