This talk is a review of the evidence and arguments that have been put forward for a major causal role for the loss of rich verbal agreement in driving changes in verb movement in the history of English. I provide some reasons to doubt the account put forward by Kroch & Taylor (1997): in particular, theories of rich agreement do not make the predictions needed for their account. More generally, I survey the distribution of verb movement and verb paradigms in historical Englishes, and sketch a new account for the loss of verb movement based on developments in the Modern English mood and aspect system.

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