The Relation of the Decline of Inflectional Morphology to the Loss of Verb Raising in English

This essay discusses the part inflectional morphology had in the loss of verb raising in English over a period ranging from Middle English to Modern English. The connection between rich morphology and verb raising is initially assumed to function along Rohrbacher’s Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which receives both support and contradiction from observations in theoretical syntax and from a variety of languages including ME and ModE and a selection of Germanic languages. The concluding evidence whether loss of morphology was the cause of the loss of verb raising in English comes from Ellegård´s quantitative study over the productivity of do-support in ME prose