:lish or translate ind I think there Interlude 4 Grammatical transition 1e means who >erhaps. But I :ory for those ny people, the , of this book, od. It is surely The transition from Old English to Middle English is primarily defined by the linguistic changes that were taking place in grammar. Old English, as we have seen (p. 4 3 ), was a language which contained a great deal of inflectional variation; Modern English has hardly any. And it is during Middle English that we see the eventual disappearance of most of the earlier inflections and the increasing reliance on alternative means of expression, using word order and prepositional constructions rather than word endings to express meaning relationships. But we must be careful not to overstate the nature of the change. The phrase 'increasing reliance' is meant to suggest that there is a great deal of continuity between the grammatical systems of Old and Middle English. Word order was by no means random in Old English, nor was it totally fixed in Middle English. To develop a feel for this change, it is important to look briefly at all the word-order possibilities in the basic construction of a sentence. In Modern English, word order controls virtually everything. In the sentence the man saw the woman, it is the order of the three main elements which is the key to understanding what the sentence is saying. These three elements are traditionally called subject (S), verb (V), and object (0), and it is the order SVO which tells us this sentence means that it is the man who was doing the seeing and not the other way round. That meaning cannot be unambiguously expressed by any of the five other possible patterns: S+O+ V the man the woman saw O+S+ V the woman the man saw O+ V +S the woman saw the man V +O+S saw the woman the man V+S+O saw the man the woman With inflectional endings, we avoid ambiguity when the word order changes. If 'the man' always has a subject ending and 'the woman' always has an object ending, then there will be no problem, whichever order is used: the man-SUBJECT saw the woman-OBJECT the woman-OBJECT saw the man-SUBJECT 102 THE STORIES OF ENGLISH In Old English, because such endings existed, we might expect to find all six And when the king mi patterns in use, and so we do; but some are much more frequent than others. -.I he noticed the no What is interesting is that the 'favourite' patterns then are also important in .... later periods. SV O is by no means a modern innovation. And what is even more er the strong tender11 interesting is to find that texts in later periods also show all six patterns. There Ille object comes fo is significant continuity as well as difference between Old, Middle, and Modem English. Here are the number of instances of S, V, and O found in samples of 300 clauses from four texts spread throughout the Old and early Middle English periods.8 start going out of 1 Parker Chronicle Alfred's Pastoral Peterborough Orrmulum , for we still obligato (734-892) Care (c. 900) Chronicle (1200) (1122-54) sv 64 82 67 84 vs 36 18 33 16 svo 30 26 5I 62 sov 35 44 17 14 osv II 21 15 8 ovs 3 2 3 4 vso 18 6 13 II VOS 3 I I I VO 18 5I 91 75 ov 82 49 9 25 • containing adjectiVi 6r phrase). A 1,ery 10111 All the patterns can be found in texts of both periods, though with very different as in this coordina frequencies. At the same time, we can see in these figures a definite trend towards is everything which I the modern system. Putting the object before the verb is a striking feature of the ..J~poneeorlW pre-900 Parker Chronicle, for example: two thirds of the patterns are like this .,J fit and twenti 00, (see the lines SOV, OSV, OVS, OV); but in the Orrmulum, dated around 1200, -1 they took Count W: we find that no less than three quarters of the patterns are the other way round. and twenty-five other Several instances of a classic Old English word order can be seen in this word-for-word translation of a sentence from an early text of the Anglo-Saxon mlarive weight of the d Chronicle (7 5 5): today. Genre could Ond pa ongeat se cyning ptet, and he on pa duru eode, And when realized the king this, and he to the door went, and pa unheanlice hine werede, op he on pone tepeling locude, . inverting his wore and then bravely himself defended, until he at the nobleman looked, _,.become . .. (OSVJ and pa ut riesde on hine, and hine miclum gewundode. ~ dif6culcy underst.i and then out rushed on him, and him severely wounded. GRAMMATICAL TRANSITION 103 :ct to find all six And when the king realized this, he went to the door, and bravely defended himself ient than others. until he noticed the nobleman; and then he rushed out at him and severely wounded lso important in him. mat is even more We see the strong tendency to put the verb element at the end of the clause, so [ patterns. There that the object comes forward. The extract also shows how it was normal dle, and ~1.odem practice to invert the subject-verb order if a clause began with an adverb - here, the linking word pa 'then'. This is especially noticeable in Chronicle 1 samples of 300 ~, where the phrase Ond pa 'and then .. .' is a major feature of the style, ~fiddle English but it is widespread in the language, with several other adverbs involved. The inversion continued to be used throughout Middle English, and did not rally start going out of use until the sixteenth century. It can even be heard Orrmulum today, for we still obligatorily invert subject and verb after a few initial adverbs (1200) with negative meaning, such as hardly, barely, and scarcely. We say Scarcely baa she left when ... and not Scarcely she had left when ... In this phrasing 84 wr are listening to an echo of what was distinctive about Old English word 16 order. 9 62 The grammatical picture is complex, and still not entirely understood. 14 Whether a clause pattern appeared as SVO or SOV, or something else seems to 8 have depended on what sort of clause it was (e.g., whether main or subordinate­ a,; in modern German), and what else was happening in the clause. To take just 4 ooe example: the object would be very likely to come forward if it were a II pronoun (ealle pa biscopas him underfengen, 'all the bishops received him'), I and less likely if it were a noun phrase, especially one which had some 'weight' 75 ioit (by containing adjectives or other elements, which would add extra meaning 25 ., the phrase). A very long noun phrase would tend to stay at the end of the :th very different dause, as in this coordinate sequence, where the verb is underlined and the te trend towards ob;ect is everything which follows: ng feature of the and namen /Jone earl Waleram and Hugo Geruieses sunu and Hugo of Munford =ms are like this and fif and twenti oore cnihtes =cl around 1200. and they took Count Waleran and Hugo Gervase's son and Hugo of Mundford ter way round. and twenty-five other knights 1 be seen in this be Anglo-Sax~ The relative weight of the elements in a sentence continues to affect word-order patterns today. Genre could be a factor also: a word-order change might appear • poetry in order to preserve the rhythm of a poetic line, as also still happens axlay. And stylistic variation is always possible, as again can be encountered IIJday. When we meet Yoda, in the Star Wars series of films, we find him locwle, agularly inverting his word order, placing the object initially: If a Jedi knight looked, JOit will become ... (OSV). This is another echo of Old English. We do not llne any difficulty understanding this exceptional pattern today, and when it 104 THE STORIES OF ENGLISH was beginning to fall out of use in Middle English doubtless it would have been just as comprehensible then. Chapter 5 Th A major grammatical frequency change of the kind described above is none the less of real significance in the history of a language. Grammar is, after all, the basis of the way in which we organize our utterances so that they make sense, through the processes of sentence construction, and it is not an aspect of language that changes very easily - unlike vocabulary and pronunciation. New words come into English on a daily basis, but new habits of grammatical construction do not. Indeed, only a handful of minor grammatical changes have taken place during the past four centuries, as we shall see in Chapter 18, though that period saw huge numbers of new words and many changes in accent. So &:cause of the shorta~ when we see English altering its balance of grammatical constructions so the~of regional Ii radically, as happened chiefly during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the ~fiddle English period kind of language which emerges as a consequence, Middle English, is rightly documents, as we shalJ dignified by a different name. geographically with a J of the Anglo-Saxon er: sharply into focus.