Word Order

The order of words in the OE sentence was relatively free. The position of words in the sentence was often determined by logical and stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints. In the following sentences the word order depends on the order of presentation and emphasis laid by the author on different parts of the communication:

‘the Finns, it seemed to him, and the Permians spoke almost the same language’ – direct word order.

‘many stories told him (lit. "him told") the Permians either about their own land or about the lands that were around them’– the objects spella, him are placed at the beginning; the order of the subject and predicate is inverted and the attention is focussed on the part of the sentence which describes the content of the stories.

Nevertheless the freedom of word order and its seeming independence of grammar should not be overestimated. The order of words could depend on the communicative type of the sentence – question versus statement, on the type of clause, on the presence and place of some secondary parts of the sentence.

Inversion was used for grammatical purposes in questions; full inversion with simple predicates and partial – with compound predicates, containing link-verbs and modal verbs:

‘From where do you bring (lit. "bring you") ornamented shields?’

‘Are you Esau, my son?’

‘What shall I sing?’

If the sentence began with an adverbial modifier, the word order was usually inverted; cf. some common beginnings of yearly entries in the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES:

‘In this year came that army to Reading’.

‘in this year went that big army’

with a relatively rare instance of direct word order after hēr.

hēr Cynewulf benam Si ebryht his rices ond Westseaxna wiotan for unryhtum dædum, būton Hāmtūnscīre ‘In this year Cynewulf and the councillors of Wessex deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom for his wicked deeds, except Hampshire (note also the separation of the two coordinate subjects Cynewulf and wiotan).

A peculiar type of word order is found in many subordinate and in some coordinate clauses: the clause begins with the subject following the connective, and ends with the predicate or its finite part, all the secondary parts being enclosed between them. Recall the quotation:

But the very next sentence in the text shows that in a similar clause the predicate could be placed next to the subject:

‘He said that he lived on the land to the North of the Atlantic ocean’. In the following passage the predicate is placed in final position both in the subordinate and coordinate clauses:

Those were the main tendencies in OE word order. They can­not be regarded as rigid rules, for there was much variability in syntactic patterns. The quotations given above show that different types of word order could be used in similar syntactical conditions. It appears that in many respects OE syntax was characterised by a wide range of variation and by the co-existence of various, sometimes even opposing, tend­encies.

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