In this study, the letters written by the Pastons between 1425 and
1450 supply the evidence for a detailed analysis of a usually neglected
aspect of fifteenth-century English syntax; the position and relative
ordering of adverbials. Crucial use is made of the tagmemic concepts of
nucleus and periphery to identify the relevant positions, and a large
inventory of adverbial complements is postulated and classified,
according to the positional preferences of each of them, into centripetal
and centrifugal elements. Severe ordering restrictions are discovered for
the nuclear adverbials and clear preferences for most peripheral ones,
and and attempt is made to explain them in terms of the principles of
nuclearity, length, end-focus, logical and topological coherence and
avoidance of ambiguity. The study contains abundant examples and a
chart summarizing all the ordering possibilities attested in the corpus.
