While most adverbs behave as described above, temporal adverbs functioning as ``scene setters'' may fail to trigger subject-verb inversion of either pronoun or full NP subjects. These are cases of adjunction to CP to the left of the specifier position and are true exceptions to the verb-second constraint as it is known from the modern Germanic languages.[8] Here are some examples from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles:
We should note that even in modern German, extremely strict in its expression of the V2 constraint, there are sentences with verb-third word order. These are of two types, `if-then' sentences and left-dislocations, as illustrated in (8):
Significantly, however, verb-third word order in German is limited to cases where the adjoined sentence-initial constituent is a constituent coindexed with the sentence topic. (We assume that such a coindexation relation obtains between the `if' clause and `then' in conditionals.) Examples like (8) with correlative conjunctions also occur in Old English (for example, the `tha ... tha' construction); but the range of constituents that can adjoin to CP goes beyond these cases to sentences without correlative syntax. There are even rare cases where adverbs other than scene-setting temporals adjoin to CP to generate verb-third word orders. The examples given in (9) are cases from the last Old English portion of the Peterborough Chronicle:[9]
The possibility of verb-third word order in Old English gives additional evidence for Pintzuk's IP-V2 analysis. Though we do not know exactly how to formalize the constraint, the CP-V2 phenomenon in languages like German involves a prohibition against adjunction to CP; for if it did not, there would be no constraint against adverb-initial verb-third sentences. In an IP-V2 language, therefore, we might expect the prohibition against adjunction to apply at the IP level, leaving open the possibility of adjunction to CP. Determining the precise conditions under which such adjunction can occur requires further investigation and is beyond the scope of this paper, but we will see it again in our Middle English data.