The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

3An outline of Middle English syntax3.1 Introductory remarksThis chapter presents a broad outline of the syntax of MiddleEnglish, i.e. English in the period 1100–1500. Many of the syntactic phenomenafound in Old English, as described in chapter 2, continue in this period,but there is also a great deal of change. In fact, it has often been said that, whileOld English is to all intents and purposes a foreign language to present-dayspeakers of English, (late) Middle English writings, such as those of Chaucer,Gower and Malory, do not confront modern readers with any major syntacticobstacles to comprehension. As the editors of a widely used anthology ofMiddle English literature put it: ‘There are many subtle differences in syntaxbetween Middle English and Modern English, but few will present any difficultyto the reader’ (Dunn and Byrnes 1973: 13). The main reason for thisdifference is no doubt the occurrence of change in many areas of grammarbetween the Old and Middle English periods.In chapters 4 to 9, we shall trace some of the individual changes in detail.It is with the aim of providing a framework against which to interpret thesechanges that this chapter sketches the basics of Middle English syntax, correspondingto the sketch of Old English in chapter 2. In section 3.2 we considerinflections in Middle English, and look at two constructions (impersonals andpassives) characterized by special inflectional marking of grammatical roles.Section 3.3 deals with word order, both within the NP and within the clause.Interrogative and negative clauses form the topic of section 3.4, and section3.5 deals with various aspects of subordinate clauses, i.e. relative clauses,complement clauses and adverbial clauses.As the descriptions in the following sections and chapters will make clear,Middle English syntax is characterized by greater variability than Old Englishsyntax. This is due not only to the diachronic developments referred to above,but also to the lesser degree of standardization of written language in MiddleEnglish, and to the sheer bulk of the material that has survived, which exhibitsmore regional, stylistic and/or social variation than is found in the survivingOld English texts. However, partly due to difficulties in locating the manu-68