Unit 27 Syntactic Structure

In the course of history the structure of the simple sentence in English in many respects became more orderly and more uniform. Yet, at the same time it grew complicated as the sentence came to include more extended and complex parts: longer attributive groups, diverse subjects and predicates and numerous predicative constructions.

In OE the ties between the words in the sentence were shown mainly by means of government and agreement, with the help of numerous inflections. In ME and Early ModE, with most of the inflectional endings levelled or dropped, the relationships between the parts of the sentence were shown by their semantic ties, prepositions, and by a more rigid syntactic structure.

In ME and Early ModE the order of words in the sentence underwent noticeable changes; it has become fixed and direct: subject + predicate + object. 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 interwined; though syntactic changes were less intensive and less rapid.

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, object, attributive, adverbial clauses. And yet many constructions – especially in early original prose – look clumsy, disorderly and wanting precision, which is natural in a language whose written form had only begun to grow.

The growth of the written forms of English, and the advance of literature in Late ME and Early ModE manifested itself, among other changes, in the further development of the compound and complex sentences. Differentiation between the two types became more evident, the use of connectives – more precise. The diversity of sentence structures in Late ME and Early ModE reveals considerable freedom in the nature and use of clauses. Many new conjunctions and other connective words appeared during the ME period, e. g. both…and, because; numerous connectives developed from adverbs and pronouns – who, what, which, where, whose, how, why.

In the 16^th-17^th c. the structure of the sentence became more complicated, which is natural to expect in a language with a growing and flourishing literature.

The structure of the sentence was further perfected in the 18^th and 19^th c. From the 15^th to 18^th c. the number of coordinating connectives was almost doubled. As before, most conspicuous was the frequent use of ‘and’, a conjunction of a most general meaning; other conjunctions widened their meanings and new connectives arose from various sources to express the subtle semantic relationships between clauses and sentences, e. g. in consequence, in fact, neither . . . nor, etc.

In the Age of Correctness (18^th c.) the employment of connectives, as well as the structure of the sentence, was subjected to logical regulation in the writings of the best stylists: John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, J. Swift, D. Defoe, and others. Their style combined a clear order with ease and flexibility of expression, which manifested itself in the choice of words, grammatical forms and syntactic patterns.