110 O L G A F I S C H E R A N D W I M VA N D E R W U R F F

Our own view is that further studies are most likely to produce answers if they combine detailed philological work (or full consideration of relevant existing work of this type) with the use of theoretical tools. Although this chapter is based on the results of research accumulated over the years rather than on a completely new investigation of the field, such a combined empirical–theoretical approach is a line of recent enquiry that we think will lead to further interesting findings in the years to come.

We have adopted as a working principle the idea that changes first need to be described and only then explained. The result is a chapter in which description is preponderant; nevertheless, we also show for many changes what kinds of explanations have been advanced and where they are still absent. The best and most detailed explanatory work on English historical syntax so far has been structural in nature, in the sense that the rise and decline of syntactic constructions have been ascribed to specific structural properties of the language at the time concerned. This, however, is no doubt partly a result of the scarcity or relative inaccessibility of other types of empirical information for large periods of the history of English. The reader should therefore keep in mind that we present a picture of the subject that in many places is oversimplified, and not only because we have had to cram over a thousand years’ worth of changes in English speech and writing into a single chapter.

The basic method of presentation is simple: we first deal with the composition of the noun phrase (Section 3.2) and the verbal group (Section 3.3), and then move on to discuss the way these can be combined to form sentences, which contain clausal constituents (Section 3.4) arranged in a certain order (Section 3.5). Discussion of more complex phenomena, such as relative clauses, complementation, other types of subordinate clause, and also negation and interrogation, can be found in whatever section the phenomenon is most relevant to. Other topics have been included where they fitted in most conveniently; where necessary, cross-references are given to help readers find their way to specific subjects.

Further help is provided by Table 3.1 below, which contains a summary of the material dealt with in this chapter. It is organised as follows: in the first column, a list of the changes discussed in the chapter is found. They are ordered in the same way as the sections are, i.e. elements within the noun phrase are given first, followed by the four systems (mood, tense etc.) that play a role in the verbal phrase etc. The next three columns in each row show the overall changes that each construction has undergone in the three main periods of the history of English. The last column indicates where the relevant discussion can be found.

3.2Internal syntax of the noun phrase

Noun phrases (NPs) can occur in various positions within the clausal unit depending on whether they function as subject, as object (direct or indirect), as complement, or as part of an adverbial or prepositional phrase. These positions

Table 3.1 The main syntactic changes

(cont.)

Table 3.1 (cont.)