The principal features of OE syntax
Old English was a synthetic language, i.e. there were a lot of inflections that showed the relations between the words in a sentence. Syntactic Connections between the Words: 1)Agreement – a correspondence between 2 or more words in Gender, Number, Case, Person: 1. relation –correspondence between the Subject and the Predicate in Number and Person; 2. correlation –agreement of an adjective, a demonstrative pronoun, a possessive pronoun, Participle 1, 2 with noun in Gender, Number, Case. 2) Government –a type of correspondence when one word (mainly a verb, less frequently – an adjective, a pronoun or a numeral) determines the Case of another word.
3) joining – an adj referring to a verb\ adj is connected with it without any formal means.
Functions of Cases: Nominative: 1)Subject of the sentence; 2) Predicative; 3)Direct Address. Genitive: 1)possessive meaning; 2)partitive meaning; 3) objective meaning; 4)subjective meaning; 5)qualitative meaning; 6)adverbial meaning. Dative: 1)Indirect Object; 2)Instrumental meaning; 3)Passive Subject of the sentence (Me lycige). Accusative: 1)Direct Object; 2) adverbial meaning denoting long periods of time.
Word Order:In OEthe word order was free as far as there were a lot of inflections that showed the relations between the words in a sentence. Most common word-order patterns were: 1)S + P + O (in non-dependent clauses); 2) S + O + P (when the Object was a pronoun,); (in dependent clauses,); 3)P + S + O (in questions);(in sentences starting with adverbial modifier,). In MEand NE, due to the loss of the Cases and, as a result, loss of the inflections the distinction between the Subject and the Object of a sentence was lost. Thus the word order became fixed and direct (S + P + O – The Subject almost always took the first place and was followed by the Object). Such word order led to the appearance of the formal Subject (formal it, there, e.g. It was winter; There is a book.) that took the place of the Subject if a sentence did not have one and thus preserved the direct word order. Inversion was used only in questions and for emphasis.
Negation:In OEthe common word for negation was ne (IE origin). It was simply placed before a word that was to be negated. As a result of this position before a word the particle ne often fused with: 1) a verb; 2)a numeral; 3) a pronoun; 4) an adverb. Multiple negation was perfectly normal. Often the particle ne was strengthened by the particle naht. In MEparticle ne fell out of use and was replaced completely by the particle naht that later developed into not, stood manly after a verb (V + not) and negated it. In NE, during the Normalisation Period, no-double-negation rule appeared that prohibited more than one negative word in a sentence.