The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

32 The syntax of early Englishæfter gúcéare /after distress of war‘it became plain to everyone that an avenger had survived the fiend after thestruggle’ (Beo 1255–58)This type of alliterative verse goes back to prehistoric Germanic times, andfinds its roots in a tradition of oral recitation. It is generally acknowledgedthat the language of the poetry is very archaic. Nevertheless, it can be used asan interesting source of data, given special consideration of its nature. Pintzukand Kroch (1989) base a word order argument on stress correspondences theyhave found in Beowulf. They argue that the position of the main verb of thesentence always corresponds with the last stressed position in a halfline, andthat this provides evidence for the basic OV (i.e. verb-last) character of OldEnglish word order. They could arrive at this conclusion because Old Englishpoetry is metrical, and this evidence is clearer than any evidence one could getfrom prose.The second example is from interlinear glosses. Interlinear glosses areanother source which is generally considered to be of dubious evidential value,but which, with special consideration, can be turned into interesting evidence.Koopman (1990) shows that a particular sequence of verbs in Old Englishoccurs sporadically in interlinear glosses, and nowhere else. He shows that theinterlinear glosses give a word-by-word translation of the Latin original, andbecause the pattern does not occur elsewhere, concludes that it is ungrammaticalin Old English. In another case, the glosses turn out to give particularlyinteresting evidence for syntactic dialect features: Kroch and Taylor (1997)consider the Old English tenth century Northumbrian glosses of the LatinVulgate Bible. They show that, where in the Latin original the subject pronounis omitted, the northern glosses in a number of cases translate this with asubject pronoun that occurs in a position different from that in southern texts.Such conscious deviations provide valuable evidence, and in this case establisha syntactic dialect feature with some plausibility.In the Middle English period, we are faced with a slightly different situation,which again needs to be considered with special care. The language ofMiddle English texts is not nearly as uniform as that of the Old English texts.Where the Old English texts, apart from a few exceptions, are in the WestSaxon dialect and literary tradition, there is no such uniformity in MiddleEnglish. All the dialects are represented, though not at all stages and in all texttypes. Diversity is what we find. Among the prose texts, we find quite a fewformal ones, and fewer informal ones. Middle English poetry is very differentfrom that composed in the Old English period. While Old English poetry inthe alliterative tradition is very archaic, Middle English poetry was written in