Word Order - раздел Образование, LECTURE 8 OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR The Order Of Words In The Oe Sentence Was Relatively Free. The Position Of Wo...
The order of words in the OE sentence was relatively free. The position of words in the sentence was often determined by logical and stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints. In the following sentences the word order depends on the order of presentation and emphasis laid by the author on different parts of the communication:
‘the Finns, it seemed to him, and the Permians spoke almost the same language’ – direct word order.
‘many stories told him (lit. "him told") the Permians either about their own land or about the lands that were around them’– the objects spella, him are placed at the beginning; the order of the subject and predicate is inverted and the attention is focussed on the part of the sentence which describes the content of the stories.
Nevertheless the freedom of word order and its seeming independence of grammar should not be overestimated. The order of words could depend on the communicative type of the sentence – question versus statement, on the type of clause, on the presence and place of some secondary parts of the sentence.
Inversion was used for grammatical purposes in questions; full inversion with simple predicates and partial – with compound predicates, containing link-verbs and modal verbs:
‘From where do you bring (lit. "bring you") ornamented shields?’
‘Are you Esau, my son?’
‘What shall I sing?’
If the sentence began with an adverbial modifier, the word order was usually inverted; cf. some common beginnings of yearly entries in the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES:
‘In this year came that army to Reading’.
‘in this year went that big army’
with a relatively rare instance of direct word order after hēr.
hēr Cynewulf benam Si ebryht his rices ond Westseaxna wiotan for unryhtum dædum, būton Hāmtūnscīre ‘In this year Cynewulf and the councillors of Wessex deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom for his wicked deeds, except Hampshire (note also the separation of the two coordinate subjects Cynewulf and wiotan).
A peculiar type of word order is found in many subordinate and in some coordinate clauses: the clause begins with the subject following the connective, and ends with the predicate or its finite part, all the secondary parts being enclosed between them. Recall the quotation:
But the very next sentence in the text shows that in a similar clause the predicate could be placed next to the subject:
‘He said that he lived on the land to the North of the Atlantic ocean’. In the following passage the predicate is placed in final position both in the subordinate and coordinate clauses:
Those were the main tendencies in OE word order. They cannot be regarded as rigid rules, for there was much variability in syntactic patterns. The quotations given above show that different types of word order could be used in similar syntactical conditions. It appears that in many respects OE syntax was characterised by a wide range of variation and by the co-existence of various, sometimes even opposing, tendencies.
THE NOUN Grammatical Categories The Use of Cases The category of number consisted of two... Table...
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Grammatical Categories. The Use of Cases
The OE noun had two grammatical or morphological categories: number and case. In addition, nouns distinguished three genders, but this distinction was not a grammatical category; it was merely a c
Morphological Classification of Nouns. Declensions
The most remarkable feature of OE nouns was their elaborate system of declensions, which was a sort of morphological classification. The total number of declensions, including both the major and mi
Table 1
a-stems included Masc. and Neut. nouns. About one third of OE nouns were Masc. a-stems, e. g. cniht
Table 4
Note should be taken of the inflections -es of the Gen. sg, -as of the Nom. and Acc.
Personal Pronouns
As shown in Table 5 below, OE personal pronouns had three persons, three numbers in the 1st and 2nd p. (two numbers – in the 3rd) and three genders in the 3rd p. The pronouns of the
Table 6
As seen from the table, the paradigm of the demonstrative pronoun sē contained many homonymous forms.
Other Classes of Pronouns
Interrogative pronouns – hwā, Masc. and Fem., and hw et, Neut., – had a four-case paradigm (NE who, what). The Instr. case of hw et was used as a separate interroga
Weak and Strong Declension
As in other OG languages, most adjectives in OE could be declined in two ways: according to the weak and to the strong declension. The formal differences between the declensions, as well as their
Table 7
and also when the adjective formed a part of a
Table 8
The root-vowel interchanges in long, eald, ʒlæd go back to different sources. The variation [a~ æ]
Grammatical Categories of the Finite Verb
The verb-predicate agreed with the subject of the sentence in two grammatical categories: number and person. Its specifically verbal categories were mood and tense. Thus in OE hē bindep
Table 9
1. Some verbs had a narrowed vowel in the 2nd a
Grammatical Categories of the Verbals
In OE there were two non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the Participle. In many respects they were closer to the nouns and adjectives than to the finite verb; their nominal features w
Table 10
As seen from the tables the forms of the two participles were strictly differentiated. Participle I was formed from the Present te
Morphological Classification of Verbs
The conjugation of verbs given in Table 9 shows the means of form-building used in the OE verb system. Most forms were distinguished with the help of inflectional endings or grammatical suffixes; o
Strong Verbs
There were about three hundred strong verbs in OE. They were native words descending from PG with parallels in other OG languages; many of them had a high frequency of occurrence a
Table 12
Classes 1 and 3 were the most numerous of all: about 60 and 80 verbs, respectively; within Class 3 the first group – with a nasal
Weak Verbs
The number of weak verbs in OE by far exceeded that of strong verbs. In fact, all the verbs, with the exception of the strong 119 verbs and the minor groups (which make a total of about 315-320 uni
Table 14
Participle II of most verbs preserved -e- before the dental suffix
Minor Groups of Verbs
Several minor groups of verbs can be referred neither to strong nor to weak verbs.
The most important group of these verbs were the so-called "preterite /'pret(ə)
Table 15
Among the verbs of the minor groups there were several anomalous verbs with irregular forms.
OE willan was an irre
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
The Simple Sentence
The following examples show the structure of the simple sentence in OE, its principal and secondary parts:
The secondary
Compound and Complex Sentences. Connectives
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
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