Word-composition

Word-composition was a highly productive way of developing the vocabulary in OE. As in other OG languages, word-composition in OE was more productive in nominal parts of speech than in verbs.

The pattern “noun plus noun” was probably the most efficient type of all: mann-cynn (NE mankind). Compound nouns with adjective-stems as the first components were less productive, e.g. wīd-sǽ ‘ocean’ (wide sea). Compound adjectives were formed by joining a noun-stem to an adjective: dōm-зeorn (“eager for glory”). The most peculiar pattern of compound adjectives was the so-called “bahuvruhi type” – adjective plus noun stem as the second component of an adjective, e.g. mild-heort ‘merciful’.

18 Old English 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. It was primarily a spoken language, consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple.

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. OE noun patterns, adjective 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, numerals and other nouns as determiners and attributes. Most noun modifiers agreed with the noun in gender, number and case, e.g. on þǽm ōþrum þrīm daзum ‘in those other three days’ – Dat. pl Masc.

An adjective pattern could include adverbs, nouns or pronouns in one of the oblique cases with or without prepositions, and infinitives, e.g. him wæs manna þearf ‘he was in need of man’.

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. brinз þā þīnз ‘bring those things’.

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. 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. 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. It also should be noted that objects were often placed before the predicate or between two parts of the predicate.

Those were the main tendencies in OE word order.