Theme: Syntax in Old English

The structure of OE sentence

The most common type of sentence in Early OE was the simple (expanded) sentence, e.g. Sōðlice sum mann hæfde twē¥en suna ‘truly a certain man had two sons’. In this sentence mann is a subject and hæfde is a simple predicate. Predicates could also be compound: modal, verbal and nominal, e.g. hwæðre þū meaht sin¥an ‘nevertheless you can sing’.

Compound and complex sentences existed in the English language since the earliest times. Coordinate clauses were mostly joined by and, a conjunction of a most general meaning, which could connect statements with various semantic relations. The connection between the parts of the sentence was shown by the form of the words as they had formal markers for gender, case, number and person.

Repetition of connectives at the head of each clause (termed “correlation”) was common in complex sentences, e.g. þā hē þā slēpte þā stod him sum mann æt ‘when he was sleeping then a man stood before him’.

The subjunctive mood was widely used in OE not only to express volition, doubt, supposition, uncertainty, but also to introduce indirect speech, e.g. hē sæ¥de þæt hē wǽre ¥earu‘he said that he was ready’. The predicate of the subordinate clause wǽre is used in the form of the subjunctive mood.

In contrast to Mod E the OE sentences seem clumsy, loosely connected, with many seemingly unnecessary repetitions, which is natural in a language whose written form had only begun to grow.