The Phrase. Noun, Adjective and Verb Patterns

SYNTAX

The syntactic structure of OE was determined by two major conditions: the nature of OE morphology and the relations between the spoken and the written forms of the language.

OE was largely a synthetic language; 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 – unless the texts were literal translations from Latin or poems with stereotyped constructions. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple; coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination; complicated syntactical constructions were rare.

The syntactic structure of a language can be described at the level of the phrase and at the level of the sentence. In OE texts we find a variety of word phrases (also: word groups or patterns). OE noun pat­terns, adjective patterns and verb patterns had certain specific features which are important to note in view of their later changes.

A noun pattern consisted of a noun as the head word and pronouns, adjectives (including verbal adjectives, or participles), numerals and other nouns as determiners and attributes. Most noun modi­fiers agreed with the noun in gender, number and case, e.g.:

Nouns which served as attributes to other nouns usually had the form of the Gen. case: hwāles bān, dēora fell ‘whale's bone, deer's fell’.

Some numerals governed the nouns they modified so that formally the relations were reversed: tamra dēora... syx hund 'six hundred tame deer'; twentiʒ scēapa ‘twenty sheep’ (dēora, scēapa – Gen. pl).

An adjective pattern could include adverbs, nouns or pronouns in one of the oblique cases with or without prepositions, and infinitives, e.g.:

Verb patterns included a great variety of dependant compo­nents: nouns and pronouns in oblique cases with or without preposi­tions, adverbs, infinitives and participles, e.g.:

Infinitives and participles were often used in verb phrases with verbs of incomplete predication (some of these phrases were later transformed into analytical forms): mihtest findan ‘might find’ in the last example, hē wolde fandian ‘he wanted to find out’, hīe on unnon mā repian ‘they began to rage more’.

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