Word order in old english

WORD ORDER IN OLD ENGLISH
CONTENTS:


INTRODUCTION.…………………………………………………………3

1. 
   Word order pattern in Old English…………………………………6
   
2. 
   The position of subject and predicative…………………………….11
   
3. 
   Word order in Old and Middle English……………………………16
   
4. 
   Word order from old English to Present Day English…………….20
   

CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………….25
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………….26
GLOSSARY…………………………………………………………………. 27

Introduction
The actuality of the theme of the course work: The phenomenon I examine in this work is word order pattern in Old English. I tried to highlight the most striking facts about the word order in Old English, its formation, distinguishing features, the positions of parts of speech, comparison of word order in Old, Middle and Modern English.
Word order refers to the conventional arrangement of words in a phrase, clause, or sentence. Compared with many other languages, word order in English is fairly rigid. In particular, the order of subject, verb, and object is relatively inflexible.
Word order in English is important, because it can change the spirit, meaning or fluency of a sentence. Basically, it is considered an SVO language, like such Romance languages as Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian, meaning that generally sentences follow the Subject-Verb-Object pattern.
If we look closer to the word order in Old English it is easy to notice that Old English word order was a lot freer than Modern English because of the case system that English had at the time. For instance, you can say “The dog bites the man” in Modern English but if you move the sentence elements around (the man bites the dog), it loses the original meaning. So with Old English we can move elements around for to emphasize certain elements in a sentence.
Moreover the change from object-verb (OV) word order to verb-object (VO) word order is one of the most striking changes in the history of the English language. According to most generative accounts, Old English is an OV language, with optional rules of prepositions.
Language users express ideas according to their intentions. Apart from syntactical and grammatical rules of a particular language, word order also depends on context and value of linguistic elements in terms of information relevance. Synthetic languages as Old English make use of inflections and are subjected to the restrictions of word order. Chamonikolasava (2009) states that Old English is more prone to linear modification providing its syntax is less controlled than that of Present Day English.
Old English (like Latin, Greek, Russian and many other languages) is an inflected language. Instead of relying on word order to indicate relationships, Old English attaches endings to each word to indicate relationships. These endings are called inflections.
Different endings mark words as subjects (the thing performing an action), direct objects (things directly receiving the action), indirect objects (things indirectly receiving the action), objects of prepositions, and genitives (things possessed by other things).
Because word endings indicate grammatical relationships, word order is not nearly as important in Old English as it is in Modern English. Therefore, words in a sentence can be arranged in various ways without changing the meaning of a sentence (there are of course some limits in this flexibility. The study of these rules and regularities is the field of Old English syntax. In general, syntax in poetry is more flexible than syntax in prose).
Thus, in Old English
Dog + (subject ending) ate cat + (object ending).
means exactly the same thing as:
Cat + (object ending) ate dog + (subject ending).
and also the same thing as:
Ate dog + (subject ending) cat + (object ending).
and also the same as:
cat + (object ending) dog + (subject ending) ate.
On the other hand,
Dog + (object ending) ate cat + (subject ending)
means something entirely different.
Furthermore, I would like to explore and describe some other differences regarding the position of the subject in main sentences in Old and Modern English and show that there are a lot of differences but also some similarities connected with the position of the subject in Modern English and in Old English. The position of the subject in Old and Modern English differs in many aspects. In Modern English the position of the subject is quite fixed while in Old English it is relatively free. The principle governing the word order of Modern English is different from the principle governing the word order of Old English. There is a working system of inflections in Old English but inflections practically disappeared in Modern English making its word order more fixed.