Abstrakt
In Present-day English, adjectival position is fixed, the general tendency being for the modifier to precede the head of the noun phrase. However, in Old English, adjectival postposition was not only widespread, but also functional.
Over the course of the Middle English period, word order became more fixed and the role of adjectival postposition diminished. Aided by the Penn-Helsinki corpora, this corpus-driven study explores the effects of dialect, genre, and loanword status on adjectival postposition, sampling its development across the Middle English period with emphasis on variables in the corpus metadata.