Observations on the loss of Verb Second in the history of English

The aim of this paper was to give a general overview of the loss of V2 or, more precisely, the loss of subject-verb inversion in clauses with a fronted non-operator and a full DP subject in the history of English. Based on data taken from two parsed corpora, I have shown that the absence of subject-verb inversion is already fairly frequent in OE and that by the 15th century inversion has become the clear minority pattern in most texts although there is still considerable variation among different texts.