The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

2An outline of Old English syntax2.1 IntroductionThe aim of this chapter is to give a descriptive overview of a numberof important features of the syntax of Old English, i.e. English from the earliesttexts (c. 800) to about 1100. The material in this chapter is primarily basedon the evidence from the two main bodies of prose text in Old English: theprose of King Alfred (ninth century) and that of Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham(tenth century). In the final section of the chapter, we will touch on some ofthe ways in which the syntax of the prose differs from that of the Old Englishpoetry.Old English is the language imported into the British isles by the immigrationsfrom the continent in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. It thereforeevolved from a number of continental West Germanic languages/dialects. Thesyntactic study of Old English can be reliably based only on one dialect: theWest Saxon standard written language or Schriftsprache, in which the bulk ofOld English writing has come down to us. There is little scope for work ondialect syntax in Old English; almost all the texts are in the West Saxon dialect,while those works of any length that were not written in West Saxon consistmostly of interlinear glosses on parts of the Vulgate bible, and are thereforeof limited use for syntactic purposes. We will nevertheless be commentingupon those aspects where they do prove revealing, which is mostly in thosecases where the gloss deviates from the original.The view of Old English presented in this chapter should be seen as a digestof the consensus view in the literature. Where such consensus is non-existent,we will attempt to clarify what the issues are.2.2 Morphology and case assignmentOld English had an inflectional system for both verbs and nouns thatwas a good deal more elaborate than the present-day one. It is not altogether37