Theme: Syntax in Old English

The Phrase. Noun, Adjective and Verb Patterns. In Early ME while the nominal parts of speech were losing most of their grammatical distinctions, the structure of the main word phrases —. with nouns, adjectives, and verbs as head-words was considerably altered.

In OE the dependent components of noun patterns agreed with the noun in case, number and gender, if they were expressed by adjectives, adjective-pronouns or participles. If expressed by nouns, they either agreed with the head-noun in case and number (nouns in apposition) or had the form of the Gen. case.

By Late ME agreement in noun patterns had practically disappeared, except for some instances of agreement in number. Formal markers of number had been preserved in nouns, demonstrative pronouns and some survivals of the strong declension of adjectives; most adjectives and adjectivised participles had lost number inflections by the age of Chaucer; cf. a few phrases from Chaucer:⁷

sg:... this holy mayden... that requeste

p1: These wodes eek recoveren grene. (‘These woods become green again.’)

as thise clerkes seyn (‘as these learned men say’)

A good man was ther of religioun. (‘There was a good man, a priest.’);

Goode men, herkneth everych on! (‘Good men, listen! ) but far more often

there was no agreement in number:

his woundes newe, the same ship, strange place, straunge strondes, etc.

(‘his new wounds,’ ‘the same ship’, ‘strange place’, ‘strange strands.’)

The last traces of agreement in adjectives were lost in the 15th c. when the inflection -e was dropped; only the demonstrative pronouns, the indefinite article and nouns in apposition indicated the number of the head-word, like in Mod E. When the adjective had lost its forms of agreement, its relationships with the noun were shown by its position; it was placed before the noun, or between the noun and its determiners (articles and pronouns). Sometimes in Late ME the adjective stood in post-position, which can be attributed to the influence of French syntax (in French the adjective was placed after the noun), e. g.: Brother dere; cares colde; woundes neuje. (Chaucer) (Relics of this practice are now found as some modern set phrases such as court martial, time immemorial.)
A noun used attributively had the form of the Gen. case or was joined to the head-noun by a preposition. In Chaucer’s time the use of -‘s-Gen. was less restricted than in Mod E, so that inanimate nouns commonly occurred as inflectional Gen. in a noun pattern: fadres sone ‘father’s son’, seintes lore ‘saint’s lore’, every shires ende ‘end of every shire’. Yet the use of prepositions had certainly become more extensive: the sergeaunts of the toun of Rome ‘the officials of the town of Rome’, men of armes ‘men of arms’, etc.
In the age of the literary Renaissance, the noun patterns became fixed syntactic frames in which every position had a specific functional significance. The attribute in pre-position was enclosed between the determiner and the head-word; hence every word occupying this position was an attribute. This is evidenced by the wide use of nouns as attributes in noun patterns at the time of Shakespeare, an age famous for its unconventional handling of parts of speech, e. g.:

Jog on, jog on. the footpath way; the darling buds of May; the master mistress of my passion; rascal counters. (Shakespeare) The standardised frame of the noun pattern is also confirmed by the fact that the position of the head noun could not be left vacant — it was at that time that the indefinite pronoun one and the demonstrative thci began to be used as the so-called “prop-words”, e. g.:

A barren-spirited fellow, one that fee

On abject orts and imitations. . (Shakespeare)

With the growth of the written language noun patterns became more varied and more extended. Attributes to nouns could contain prepositional phrases with otherattributes:

For drunkennesse is verray sepulture