The second sentence type consists of those sentences in which the first constituent is a topicalized non-subject, either a non-pronominal NP complement, a prepositional argument or adjunct, or an adverb. In this type, word order depends on whether the subject is a pronoun or a non-pronominal NP. In the latter case, the tensed verb appears immediately after the first constituent -- that is, in second position; hence, it is inverted with respect to the subject. Some examples, taken from Pintzuk (1991) and Kemenade (1987), are listed in (3):
When the subject is a pronoun, however, it ordinarily appears before rather than after the tensed verb, yielding superficial verb-third word order. This special behavior of pronoun subjects is due to their clitic-like character (Kemenade 1987, Pintzuk 1991) and is not evidence of variability or irregularity in the adherence of Old English to the verb-second constraint. Here are some examples of the use of pronoun subjects yielding verb-third word order, taken from Pintzuk (1991):
Under Pintzuk's analysis of Old English as an IP-V2 language, the word order in (4) reflects movement of the verb to I-zero and movement of a topic to Spec,IP. Clitic pronouns in Old English, like pronouns in the other verb-final West Germanic languages, move to the boundary between CP and IP and so should appear sentence-initially. However, because sentence-initial position is not available for clitics (perhaps for reasons of prosodic phonology), Pintzuk proposes a special rule to postpose clitic pronouns to the immediate right of the first constituent. Hence, when the verb moves to I-zero, the pronominal subject appears immediately before it, between the topic and the verb. Full NP subjects, as in (3), remain in their underlying position in Spec,VP and are assigned nominative case under government, as has been proposed for the modern IP-V2 languages (see Hulk & van Kemenade 1988, Santorini 1992). With pronominal objects of verbs and prepositions, as in the examples from Pintzuk in (5) below, the same sort of verb-third effect appears, and for the same reason, since they too generally behave as clitics.
Example (5b) shows that the verb appears in fourth position when a sentence contains both a subject and an object clitic. In addition to pronouns, certain monosyllabic adverbs (for example, `so') may also move to this position, suggesting that the clitic behavior of Old English pronouns is a grammaticized form of the leftward scrambling of constituents commonly found in Germanic.