Theme: Syntax in Old English

Word order

The order of words in the OE sentence was relatively free. 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.

The range of the possessive case of nouns has been narrowed. It has come to be used almost exclusively with nouns denoting living beings. As a spelling device the apostrophe was introduced in the 18^th century.

The personal pronoun of the second person plural (ye, you) and the corresponding possessive pronoun (your) have gradually ousted the corresponding singular pronouns (thou, thee, thine) from everyday usage. The form of the objective case (you) has ousted the nominative case form (ye).

The possessive pronouns my, mine, which were originally but phonetic variants have acquired different combinability and consequently different functions. This distinction has become relevant and has spread to other possessive pronouns to which the suffix –s has been added. Hence the forms her and hers, our and ours, your and yours, their and theirs.

The pronoun hit has lost its initial h, the form its was introduced in the 17^th century.³

The adjective has lost all its inflexions but those of the degrees of comparison. The current distribution of synthetic and analytic forms of comparison has been established.

The verb has lost the ending of the infinitive and all the inflexions of the present tense but that of the third person singular. The latter has acquired the form -(e)s (from the northern dialects) instead of the southern -(e)th.The form of the second person singular (e.g. speakest) has been lost or become archaic.

The four basic forms of the strong verbs have been reduced to three, most verbs (except to be) losing the distinction between the past tense singular and the past tense plural.

The so-called ‘continuous’ and ‘perfect continuous’ forms of the verb have developed from former syntactical combinations of the verb to be and participle I of some notional verb.

The infinitive, gerund and participle have developed analytical ‘perfect’ and ‘passive’ forms. The infinitive has also developed ‘continuous’ forms.⁴

 

3.