Word Order

Functions of Cases

Syntactic Connections between the Words

The Development of the Syntactic System

Lecture 19

OE

Old English was a synthetic language, i.e. there were a lot of inflections that showed the relations between the words in a sentence.

1. Agreement – a correspondence between 2 or more words in Gender, Number, Case, Person:

· relation – correspondence between the Subject and the Predicate in Number and Person;

· 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:

e.g.: OE niman (to take) à noun in Acc;

OE secζan (to say) à noun in Dat (to whom?), noun in Acc (what?);

OE hlusten (to listen) à noun in Gen.

Nominative:

· Subject of the sentence;

· Predicative;

· Direct Address.

Genitive:

· possessive meaning;

· partitive meaning;

· objective meaning;

· subjective meaning;

· qualitative meaning;

· adverbial meaning.

Dative:

· Indirect Object;

· Instrumental meaning;

· Passive Subject of the sentence (Me lycige).

Accusative:

· Direct Object;

· adverbial meaning denoting long periods of time (þone winter – той зимой).

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, e.g. OE Ic þe secζe – literally “to you say”);

(in dependent clauses, e.g. OE þis w æ s ζefohten siþþan hē of Ēāst Enþlum cōm – literally “This battle was held when he from eastern England came” – such word order was called “frame” – after a connective went the Subject, it was followed by all the other parts of the sentence and the last place was occupied by the Predicate which thus created a frame together with the Subject);

3. P + S + O(in questions, e.g. OE Hwat sceal ic sinζan – “What shall I sing?”);

(in sentences starting with adverbial modifier, e.g. OE Nū synt ζeþrēāde þeζnas mīne – literally “Now were threatened my servants”).

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.

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