Lecture 19

The Development of the Syntactic System

OE

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:

· relation – correspondence between the Subject and the Predicate in Number and Person;

· 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:

e.g.: OE niman (to take) à noun in Acc;

OE secζan (to say) à noun in Dat (to whom?), noun in Acc (what?);

OE hlusten (to listen) à noun in Gen.

Functions of Cases

Nominative:

· Subject of the sentence;

· Predicative;

· Direct Address.

Genitive:

· possessive meaning;

· partitive meaning;

· objective meaning;

· subjective meaning;

· qualitative meaning;

· adverbial meaning.

Dative:

· Indirect Object;

· Instrumental meaning;

· Passive Subject of the sentence (Me lycige).

Accusative:

· Direct Object;

· adverbial meaning denoting long periods of time (þone winter – той зимой).