27. Oe syntax

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. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple; complicated syntactical constructions were rare.

The Phrase. Noun, Adjective and Verb Patterns

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, Infinitives and participles were often used in verb phrases

The Simple Sentence

The structure of the OE sentence can be described in terms of Mod E syntactic analysis, for the sentence was made up of the same parts, except that those parts were usually simpler. Attributive groups were short and among the parts of the sentence there were very few predicative constructions ("syntactical complexes"). Absolute constructions with the noun in the Dat. case were sometimes used in translations from Latin in imita­tion oF the Latin Dativus Absolutus. The objective predicative con­struction "Accusative with the Infinitive" occurred in original OE texts:

The connection between the parts of the sentence was shown by the form of the words as they had formal markers for gender, case, number and Person. As compared with later periods agreement and government played an important role in the word phrase and in the sentence. Accordingly the place of the word in relation to other words was of secondary importance and the order of words was relatively free

The presence of formal markers made it possible to miss out some parts of the sentence which would be obligatory in an English sentence now. In the following instance the subject is not repeated but the form of the predicate shows that the action is performed by the same person as the preceding action:

One of the conspicuous features of OE syntax was multiple negation within a single sentence or clause. The most common negative particle was ne, which was placed before the verb; it was often accom­panied by other negative words, mostly naht or noht {which had devel­oped from ne plus d-wikt 'no thing'). These words reinforced the mean­ing of negation:

Another peculiarity of OE negation was that the particle ne could be attached to some verbs, pronouns and adverbs to form single words:

Compound and Complex Sentences. Connectives

Compound and complex sentences existed in the English lan­guage since the earliest times. Even in the oldest texts we find numerous instances of coordination and subordination and a large inventory of subordinate clauses, subject clauses, object clauses, attributive clauses,

Coordinate clauses were mostly Joined by and, a conjunc­tion of a most general meaning, which could connect statements with various semantic relations.

Repetition of connectives at the head of each clause (termed "correlation") was common in complex sentences:

Attributive clauses were joined to the principal clauses by means of various connectives, there being no special class of relative pronouns. The main connective was the indeclinable particle pe employed either alone or together with demonstrative and personal pronouns:

The pronouns could also be used to join the clauses without the par­ticle pe:

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.

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:

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

Different types of word order couid 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