Theme: syntax in oe contents I. Introduction II. Main body. Structural relations of old english

THEME: SYNTAX IN OE

CONTENTS

I.Introduction

II. Main body. Structural relations of old english.

1.Theoretical and practical views of Word Order in Old English.

2. Peculiarities of syntactic structure of "Phrase".

3. Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic relations of sentence.

III. Questions

IV. Glossary

V. Tests

VI. Conclusion

VII. References

Introduction

My course work theme is the syntax in Old English. There are many differences between old and modern English in terms of syntax. In OE the word order and the sentence structure were rather free. I mean that the formation of a sentence does not matter how to form it. But in middle and modern English it is structured as Subject-Verb- Object. Old English was a synthetic language (the lexical and grammatical notions of the word were contained in one unit). It was highly inflected with many various affixes.The principal grammatical means were suffixation, vowel interchange and supplition.Historical syntax has been studied to a much smaller extent than either phonetics, lexicology or morphology. Though the main trends in the development of syntactic structure appear to be clear, many more detailed investigations have yet to be made to complete the picture. The position of words in the sentence was often determined by logical and stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints. Nevertheless the freedom of word order and its seeming independence of grammar should not be overestimated. The order of words could depend on the communicative type of the sentence – question versus statement, on the type of clause, on the presence and place of some secondary parts of the sentence. A peculiar type of word order is found in many subordinate and in some coordinate clauses: the clause begins with the subject following the connective, and ends with the predicate or its finite part, all the secondary parts being enclosed between them. It also should be noted that objects were often placed before the predicate or between two parts of the predicate. Those were the main tendencies in OE word order.