Languages
tending towards fixing the order of their main sentence constituents lose constructions that in earlier times were syntactically
possible. We can see this in the long-term development of English and French. In English until about 1250 it was normal to
invert verb and subject in a negated clause, just as in other early Germanic languages. How this construction was lost is described here.
It was
also possible to sandwich a direct object between an auxiliary and the main verb. This construction remained common in
negative clauses until much later than in other clause types.
Verb-Subject
order actually gained ground at the end of the Old French period, as is shown by a quantitative study of the et VS
construction which became common around 1300 onwards, only to die out in the modern period.
The most archaic Latin, and the Latin of the classical writers, tended to follow Subject-Object-Verb order, but Subject-Verb–Object
order became more common in its later stages, foreshadowing the unmarked order of Romance languages. Probably as part of that
development, the order of Subject and Verb showed a tendency to invert with intransitive verbs in Late Latin. Evidence for
this can be seen by comparing Christian with pre-Christian funerary inscriptions
