DE HISTORISCHE WORTELS VAN VOLGORDEVARIATIE IN HET HEBBEN-PERFECTUM.

Standard Dutch exhibits an intriguing case of synchronic word order variation: in the subordinate clause both the word order auxiliary - past participle and past participle - auxiliary exists without any clear difference in meaning or function. The present paper focuses on the diachronic development of this type of variation. A case study of word order variation in the have perfect in a corpus of historical texts dating from the thirteenth until the twentieth century reveals two major verb order changes (1) in the late thirteenth century, the order have - past participle is dominant, but it gradually disappears in the fourteenth and fifteenth century (2) this tendency is reversed in the sixteenth century as the order have - past participle gradually increases in frequency until the present day. In addition to the diachronic description of verb order patterns, a first attempt is made to relate the changing verb order in Middle Dutch to more global patterns of syntactic reorganisation, i.e. the development of the have perfect and the changing word order in the subordinate clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]