Lecture 6 Old English Syntax

Lecture 6

Old English Syntax

The plan of the lecture:

• 1. Main features of OE Syntax
• 2. Syntactic connection in words

OE Syntax sentence structure

• OE was largely a synthetic language - synthetic language, any language in which syntactic relations within sentences are expressed by inflection (the change in the form of a word that indicates distinctions of tense, person, gender, number, mood, voice, and case) or by agglutination (word formation by means of morpheme, or word unit, clustering).
• it possessed a system of grammatical forms which could indicate the connection between words; consequently, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple; complicated syntactical constructions were rare.

Word order

• The standard order of subject, object, and verb in a declarative sentence in Modern English is subject first, followed by verb, followed by object, however, Old English doesn't always use SVO order in its sentences and clauses.
• For instance, in "Cynewulf and Cyneheard" we have examples of the following orders:
• SVO order:
• He hæfde þa [i.e. Hamtunscire]oþ he ofslog þone aldormon.
• He had it [i.e. Hampshire] until he killed the ealdorman.
• He wræc þone aldor mon Cumbran.
• He avenged the ealdorman Cumbra.

OE
PDE
SVO
OSV
VSO
VOS

• VSO order:
• Þa geascode he þone cyning.
• Then he discovered the king.
• OSV order:
• hiene þa Cynewulf on Andred adræfde.
• Cynewulf then drove him into [the forest] Andred.
• ær hine þa men onfunden þe mid þam kyninge wærun.
• before the men discovered him who were with the king
• VOS order:
• Ða on morgenne gehierdun þæt þæs cyninges þegnas.
• Then in the morning the kings thegns heard that.

• The question were usually build with the help of inversion, gehrst Þu Þā word? (Have you heard this word?)

Syntactic Connections between the Words:

• 1) Agreement – a correspondence between 2 or more words in Gender, Number, Case, Person: 1. relation –correspondence between the Subject and the Predicate in Number and Person; 2. correlation –agreement of an adjective, a demonstrative pronoun, a possessive pronoun, Participle 1, 2 with noun in Gender, Number, Case.
• 2) Government –a type of correspondence when one word (mainly a verb, less frequently – an adjective, a pronoun or a numeral) determines the Case of another word.
• 3) Joining – an adj referring to a verb\ adj is connected with it without any formal means.

Functions of Cases:

• Nominative: 1) Subject of the sentence; 2) Predicative; 3)Direct Address.
• Genitive: 1) possessive meaning; 2) partitive meaning (Partitive nouns are used with another noun to tell you how much of that noun there is. "Boxes" in "three boxes of cereal" is a partitive noun because it describes a specific quantity of cereal.); 3) objective meaning (Take mine); 4) subjective meaning; 5) qualitative meaning (“This project of higher priority”); 6) adverbial meaning Stay at ours.

Functions of Cases

• Dative: 1) Indirect Object; 2) Instrumental meaning; 3) Passive Subject of the sentence (Me lycige).
• Accusative: 1) Direct Object; 2) adverbial meaning denoting long periods of time.

Word Order:

• In OE the word order was free as far as there were a lot of inflections that showed the relations between the words in a sentence. Most common word-order patterns were:
• 1)S + P + O (in non-dependent clauses);
• 2) S + O + P (when the Object was a pronoun,); (in dependent clauses,);
• 3)P + S + O (in questions);(in sentences starting with adverbial modifier,).

Formal subject

• In ME and NE, due to the loss of the Cases and, as a result, loss of the inflections the distinction between the Subject and the Object of a sentence was lost.
• Thus the word order became fixed and direct (S + P + O – The Subject almost always took the first place and was followed by the Object).
• Such word order led to the appearance of the formal Subject (formal it, there, e.g. It was winter; There is a book.) that took the place of the Subject if a sentence did not have one and thus preserved the direct word order.
• Inversion was used only in questions and for emphasis.

Negation:

• In OE the common word for negation was ne (IE origin). It was simply placed before a word that was to be negated. As a result of this position before a word the particle ne often fused with: 1) a verb; 2)a numeral; 3) a pronoun; 4) an adverb.
• Multiple negation was perfectly normal. Often the particle ne was strengthened by the particle naht.
• In ME particle ne fell out of use and was replaced completely by the particle naht that later developed into not, stood manly after a verb (V + not) and negated it.
• In NE, during the Normalisation Period, no-double-negation rule appeared that prohibited more than one negative word in a sentence.

• Thank you