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The purpose of this paper is to examine various types of topicalizations in Old English (OE) and to argue that the fronting of some elements in subordinate (or non-root) clauses is not a genuine topicalization. It has been claimed that while fronting of non-subjects occurs with V-movement to the second position in root clauses, there is no such fronting in non-root clauses, which thus led Kemenade (1997a, b) and Fischer et al. (2000), etc. to claim the asymmetry of V-movement between root and non-root clauses. Yet, the fronting of non-subjects in non-root clauses is found, its distribution being limited to impersonal, passive, and ergative verb constructions. This paper argues that the dative NP, though superficially being non-subject, is in fact a subject in impersonal (passive) constructions. Passive constructions with nominative arguments and ergative verb constructions share unaccusative structures in which the underlying object becomes a surface subject. OE allowed a lexically unrealized expletive in the unaccusative structure, which later becomes lexically realized as the expletive 'there'. In subordinate clauses in OE, therefore, there was no genuine topicalization of non-subjects with V-movement.

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