LECTURE 8. THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH SYNTAX
Outline
1.General remark
2.The development of Word Order
. Types of syntactical relations btw words in the phrase. Their further development. p>. The development of the composite sentence
a. The compound sentence
b. The complex sentence
1. General remark
the angle of diachronic approach many problems of English syntax have not been solved yet. They await further careful investigation.dealing with the historical development of English syntax we set out from the fact that OE was a synthetic type of language and its syntax was based on inflections. But in the course of time analytical tendencies have actually reshaped the syntactic structure of English both by generating a new scope of syntactic distinctions and of new means of expressing them. br/>
2. The WO. Its development
phrase syntactic english
OE texts reveal a variety of types of sentences: simple, compound and complex. According to the aims of communication they may be declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory. In other words, all the basic types of sentences that occur in Modern English have their counterparts in the OE period. But the syntax of the OE sentence is characterized by a number of peculiarities which distinguish it from the Modern English sentence. p align="justify">. OE can build sentences that do not include any formal subject: eg m? þ ? hte (it seemed to me). The subject may also be omitted if the subject of the action can be guessed from the context: eg sy ðð an æ rest wear ð f? asceaft funden, h? þæ s fr? Fre geb? D (after he was found helpless, he found consolation in this) < span align = "justify">. is evident from the context of this complex sentence that the subject of the action in the subordinate clause is the person denoted by the subject of the principal clause.
. There may be more than one negation referring to the same predicate group which is impossible in Modern English: eg Ne m ? Tte h? Г¦ rn? N geb? N land (he didn t meet any inhabited land before).
. The word order can be relatively free. Since syntactic relationships were fairly well shown by inflections, WO was of less importance for this purpose. It plays a grammatical role only in interrogative sentences in which the subject normally occupies the position after the predicate: eg Hw æ t sceal ic sin3an? (What shall I sing?) Or h? mihtest þu hit sw ? hr æ dlice findan? (How could you find this so soon?). Narrative (affirmative) sentences the common order of words is: subject - predicate: eg st æ rt w æ s st? nf? h, st? 3 w? sode 3umum æ t 3æ dere (the street was paved with stones of various colours, the path directed the men together), though inversion is frequent in this type of sentence: eg Ne sea hic el þ ? odi3 e þus mani 3 e men m? d? 3licran (I didn't see so many brave warriors from strange lands). is especially frequent if the sentence begins with a secondary part: either with an object or an adverbial modifier. The inverted word-order is used when something new or unexpected is introduced: eg Fela spella him sædon þ ? Beormas (many stories told him those Beormas). This sentence the first position is occupied by the direct object. ...
