A history of the English Language

122.
Middle English Syntax.
As a result of the leveling of inflections, syntactic and semantic relationships that had 
been signaled by the endings on words now became ambiguous. Whereas in Old English 
the grammatical functions of two consecutive nouns were clear from their endings in, 
say, the nominative and dative cases, in Middle English their functions might be 
uncertain. The most direct way to avoid this kind of ambiguity is through limiting the 
possible patterns of word order. The process of development from the highly synthetic 
stage of Old English (see § 40) to the highly analytic stages of Late Middle English and 
Modern English can be seen in the 
Peterborough Chronicle
. Written in installments 
between 1070 and 1154, this text of the 
Anglo-Saxon Chronide
spans the period from Old 
English to Early Middle English. Within the continuations of the text it is possible to 
trace first a significant loss of inflections and afterwards a corresponding rigidity of word 
order, making clear the direction of cause and effect.
12
This process of development and 
A history of the english language 154

---

the reality of Middle English as a separate stage of the language grammatically (as well 
as phonologically and lexically) can be seen in the patterns of subject and verb. In 
addition to the Modern English order SV, Old English had VS and, in subordinate 
clauses, S…V (with the finite verb in final position). All of these patterns are still 
possible even in the last years of the 
Peterborough Chronicle
. Thus, the word order 
looked much like that of Old English at a time when the inflectional system looked much 
like that of Modern English. As Bruce Mitchell writes, “the language of the 
Peterborough Chronide
1122–1154 is Middle, not Modern, English. It is transitional.”
13
And as its most recent editor puts it: “before our eyes English is beginning to change 
from a synthetic language to an analytic one.”
14
It is important to emphasize that these changes which affected the grammatical 
structure of English after the Norman Conquest were not the result of contact with the 
French language. Certain idioms and syntactic usages that appear in Middle English are 
clearly the result of such contact.
15
But the decay of inflections and the confusion of 
forms that constitute the truly significant development in Middle English grammar are the 
result of the Norman Conquest only insofar as that event brought about conditions 
favorable to such changes. By removing the authority that a standard variety of English 
would have, the Norman Conquest made it easier for grammatical changes to go forward 
unchecked. Beyond this it is not considered a factor in syntactic changes.