---
title: "Labile Verbs and Word Order in Early Middle English: an Initial"
description: "The study tests a hypothesis from García García (2012): when English lost its morphological marking of valency in causative… 17 references."
authors: ["Luisa García García", "Esaúl Ruiz Narbona"]
year: 2012
venue: "SELIM 19"
source: "https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/view/13342"
doi: "10.17811/selim.19.2012.59-79"
licence: "CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/garcia-2019-labile-verbs-word-order-early/"
---
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# Labile Verbs and Word Order in Early Middle English: an Initial Study

**Authors:** Luisa García García and Esaúl Ruiz Narbona · **Year:** 2012 · **Venue:** [SELIM 19](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/) ([SELIM Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2012](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/2012/)) · **Publisher:** [University of Oviedo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/university-of-oviedo/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.19.2012.59-79) · [PDF](https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/download/13342/12069) · [DOI 10.17811/selim.19.2012.59-79](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.19.2012.59-79) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W6962518647)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The study tests a hypothesis from García García (2012): when English lost its morphological marking of valency in causative pairs and replaced them with labile verbs (one form used both intransitively and causatively), syntax may have taken over the job of disambiguation. Two syntactic means are considered: always expressing the subject overtly and keeping a consistent word order. The authors draw clauses from LAEME (Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English), which they chose because it is the fullest diplomatic corpus of the period. They look at three frequent labile verbs, burnen, melten and (a)quenchen, and compare them with a transitive-only verb, (a)quellen, and an intransitive-only verb. For each clause they count overt versus missing subjects, SV versus VS order and VO versus OV order, and they break the counts down by clause type. Subject omission and SV/VS order show no link to lability. However, transitive labile verbs lean toward VO, while (a)quellen strongly prefers OV. This suggests that labile verbs may have adopted the later canonical order early and helped drive the OV→VO shift. The authors call the findings preliminary.

## Key points
- Of the 57 Old English jan-causative pairs that can be reliably traced, only 12 survive into Middle English. Many of the lost oppositions became labile verbs.
- Data come from LAEME. The labile verbs are burnen, melten and (a)quenchen, and the transitive-only control is (a)quellen.
- The transitive-only (a)quellen appears with OV in 70.9% of cases. Transitive labile verbs show VO in 54.54% of cases.
- Missing subjects depend on clause type, not on lability. They occur only in coordinated clauses, modal infinitival clauses and imperatives.
- Intransitive labile verbs and the intransitive-only verb behave almost identically for SV/VS order. The slightly higher VS count for the intransitive-only verb does not appear significant.

## Interesting ideas
- With a labile verb, (S)OV order is ambiguous between an intransitive reading with a patient subject and a transitive reading. SVO removes this ambiguity, so word position does the job that a valency affix used to do.
- The target verb class is always measured against matched controls (a transitive-only and an intransitive-only verb), so that any effect is judged against a baseline rather than in isolation.
- All counts are stratified by clause type (main, coordinated, embedded, modal infinitival), because clause type was the real driver of some patterns, such as subject omission.
- Subjects go missing systematically in coordination, modal infinitivals and imperatives, so a missing subject is predictable rather than random.
- The English–Spanish contrast (melt vs derretir/derretirse) shows that a language with flexible order and pro-drop must mark valency on the verb, while English relies on syntax.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (frames): For labile verbs like melt, burn or break, assign Agent vs Patient from whether a post-verbal object exists. If there is none, read the subject as the undergoer (inchoative frame), not the causer.
- **I2** (learn): When evaluating a repair rule or silver data for a verb class, report the same metric on a matched non-target class as a negative control, to show the change is class-specific.
- **I3** (tree): Break parser LAS down by clause type, so that errors concentrated in embedded or infinitival clauses are not hidden in one overall number.
- **I4** (frames): Coreference can fill empty subject slots by rule: take the subject of the first conjunct in coordination, the controller in infinitivals, and the addressee in imperatives.
- **I5** (back): When translating a labile English verb through the meta-world, choose the causative or the reflexive/anticausative form in the target language based on whether the frame contains a causer.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

Also on the byline: [Universidad de Sevilla](https://ror.org/03yxnpp24).

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## Cite

Cite as: Luisa García García and Esaúl Ruiz Narbona. 2012. Labile Verbs and Word Order in Early Middle English: an Initial Study. SELIM 19.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{garcia2012labile,
  title = {{Labile Verbs and Word Order in Early Middle English: an Initial Study}},
  author = {Luisa García García and Esaúl Ruiz Narbona},
  booktitle = {SELIM 19},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.19.2012.59-79},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.19.2012.59-79}
}
```

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## References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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17. Received 30 May 2013; accepted 10 Jul 2013 • SELIM 19 (2012) [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Received+30+May+2013%3B+accepted+10+Jul+2013+%E2%80%A2+SELIM+19+%282012%29)

*Updated 24 October 2026*