Theme: Word order in Middle English

The novelty of the work. "One of the primary reasons that this consonant shift has become known as Word order in Middle English is that it profoundly affected English language, and these changes coincided with the introduction of the printing press: William Caxton brought the first mechanized printing press to England in 1476. Prior to mechanized printing, words in the handwritten texts had been spelled pretty much, however, each particular scribe wanted to spell them, according to the scribe's own dialect.¹

Content of the work. The present course work consists of four parts: introduction, one chapter, conclusion and bibliography. It also includes the appendix where interesting Internet materials, schemes and illustrative thematic materials were gathered.

1. 
   Middle English a Period of Great Change.
   

The Middle English period (1150–1500) was marked by momentous changes in the English language, changes more extensive and fundamental than those that have taken place at any time before or since. Some of them were the result of the Norman Conquest and the conditions which followed in the wake of that event. Others were a continuation of tendencies that had begun to manifest themselves in Old English. These would have gone on even without the Conquest, but they took place more rapidly because the Norman invasion removed from English those conservative influences that are always felt when a language is extensively used in books and is spoken by an influential educated class. The changes of this period affected English in both its grammar and its vocabulary. They were so extensive in each department that it is difficult to say which group is the more significant. Those in the grammar reduced English from a highly inflected language to an extremely analytic one.² Those in the vocabulary involved the loss of a large part of the Old English word-stock and the addition of thousands of words from French and Latin. At the beginning of the period English is a language that must be learned like a foreign tongue; at the end it is Modern English.

The evolution of English syntax was tied up with profound changes in morphology; the decline of the inflectional system was accompanied by the growth of the functional load of syntactic means of word connection. The most obvious difference between OE syntax and the syntax of the ME and NE periods is that the word order became more strict and the use of prepositions more extensive. The growth of the literary forms of the language, the literary flourishing in Late ME and especially in the age of the Renaissance, the differentiation of literary styles and the efforts made by 18th c. scholars to develop a logical, elegant style — all contributed to the improvement and perfection of English syntax. The structure of the sentence and the word phrase, on the one hand, became more complicated, on the other hand — were stabilised and standardised.