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, e.g.:
Nouns which served as attributes to other nouns usually had the form of the Gen. case: hwāles bān, dēora fell ‘whale's bone, deer's fell’.
Some numerals governed the nouns they modified so that formally the relations were reversed: tamra dēora ... syx hund 'six hundred tame deer'; twentiʒ scēapa ‘twenty sheep’ (dēora, scēapa – Gen. pl).
An adjective pattern could include adverbs, nouns or pronouns in one of the oblique cases with or without prepositions, and infinitives, e.g.:
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.:
Infinitives and participles were often used in verb phrases with verbs of incomplete predication (some of these phrases were later transformed into analytical forms): mihtest findan ‘might find’ in the last example, hē wolde fandian ‘he wanted to find out’, hīe on unnon mā repian ‘they began to rage more’.
The Simple Sentence
The following examples show the structure of the simple sentence in OE, its principal and secondary parts:
The secondary parts of the sentence are seen in the same examples: tweʒen suna ‘two sons’ – Direct Object with an attribute, spēdiʒ 'rich' – attribute. In the examples of verb and noun patterns above we can find other secondary parts of the sentence: indirect and prepositional objects, adverbial modifiers and appositions: hys mēder 'to his mother' (Indirect Object), tō his suna 'to his son' (Prep. Object), his hlāforde, Æ1frēde cyninʒe 'his lord king Alfred' (apposition), etc. 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 travellers saw land, the cliffs shine, steep mountains'.
Predicative constructions after habban (NE have) contained a Past Participle.
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:
The formal subject was lacking in many impersonal sentences (though it was present in others); cf.:
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 nāht or nōht (which had developed from ne plus ā-wiht '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:
