3. Word order.

In ME and Early NE the order of words in the sentence underwent noticeable changes: it had become fixed and direct: subject plus predicate plus object (S+P+O) or subject plus the notional part of the predicate (used mainly in questions).

Stabilization of the word order was a slow process, which took many hundreds of years: from Early ME until the 16^th or 17^th c. the fixation of the word order proceeded together with reduction and loss of inflectional endings, the two developments being intertwined; though syntactic changes were less intensive and less rapid, probably due to the break in the written tradition after the Norman conquest.

Though the word order in Late ME may appear relatively free, several facts testify to its growing stability. The practice of placing the verb-predicate at the end of a subordinate clause had been abandoned, so was the type of word order with the object placed between the subject and the predicate. The place before the predicate belonged to the subject.

In the 17^th and 18^th c. the order of words in the sentence was generally determined by the same rules as operate in English today. The fixed, direct word order prevailed in statements, unless inversion was required for communicative purposes or for emphasis, e.g.:

“Now comes in the sweetest morsel in the night… These numbers will I tear and write in prose.” (Shakespeare)

4. The phrase: noun, adjective and verb patterns

In OE the dependent components of noun patterns agreed with the noun in case, number and gender, if they were expressed by adjectives, adjective-pronouns or participles. If expressed by nouns, they either agreed with the head noun in case and number (nouns in apposition) or had the form of the genitive case. By Late ME agreement in noun patterns had practically disappeared, except for some instances of agreement in number. Formal markers of number had been preserved in nouns, demonstrative pronouns and some survivals of the strong declension of adjectives; most adjectives and adjectivised participles had lost number inflections by the age of Chaucer; cf. a few phrases from Chaucer:

sg.:… this holy maiden… that requeste

pl.: These wodes eek recoveren grene. ‘These woods become green again’.

sg.: A good man was ther of religioun. ‘There was a good man, a priest’.

pl.: Goode men, herkneth everych on! ‘Good men, listen!’

However, far more often there was no agreement in number:

…his woundes newe, the same ship, strange place, straunge strondes ‘his new wounds’, ’the same ship’, ‘strange place’, ‘strange strands’.

The last traces of agreement in adjectives were lost in the 15^th c. when the inflection –e was dropped; only the demonstrative pronouns, the indefinite article and nouns in apposition indicated the number of the head-word, like in Mod E. When the adjective had lost its forms of agreement, its relationships with the noun were shown by its position; it was placed before the noun, or between the noun and its determiners (articles and pronouns). Sometimes in Late ME the adjective stood in post-position, which can be attributed to the influence of French syntax. Relics of this practice are now found as some modern set phrases such as court martial, time immemorial.

A noun used attributively had the form of the genitive case or was joined to the head-noun by a preposition. In Chaucer’s time the use of ‘s-genitive was less restricted than in Mod E, so that inanimate nouns commonly occurred as inflectional genitive in a noun pattern: fadres sone ‘father’s son’, every shires ende ‘end of every shire’. Yet the use of prepositions had become more extensive: the sergeaunts of the toun of Rome ‘the officials of the town of Rome’.

In the age of literary Renaissance, the noun patterns became fixed syntactic frames in which every position had a specific functional significance. The attribute in pre-position was enclosed between the determiner and the head-word; hence every word occupying this position was an attribute. The position of the head-noun could not be left vacant – it was at that time that the indefinite pronoun one and the demonstrative that began to be used as the so-called “prop-words”, e.g.

A barren-spirited fellow, one that feeds

On abject orts and imitations… (Shakespeare)

With the growth of the written language noun patterns became more varied and more extended. Attributes to nouns could contain prepositional phrases with other attributes.

The history of the verb pattern embraced a number of important changes and developments.

In some respects verb patterns became more uniform. In OE the verb could take various objects and adverbial modifiers expressed by the oblique cases of nouns. In ME the oblique cases were replaced by the common case (or the objective case of pronouns), with – or without – prepositions. The use of prepositions in verb patterns grew.

Throughout ME and Early NE the use of prepositions displayed great fluctuation. Many verbs were used with a variety of prepositions until the age of prescriptive grammars and dictionaries, and some verbs – a long time after. During the NE period the size and complexity of verb patterns grew, as the verbs came to be extended by noun patterns of more complicated structure, by infinitive phrases and predicative constructions with diverse components.