Word Order

The order of words in the OE sentence was relatively free. The position of words in the sentence was often determined by logical and stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints. In tin-following sentences the word order depends on the order of presentation and emphasis laid by the author on different parts of the communication:

pa Finnas, him puhte, and pa Beormas spraecon neah an 3epeoda 'the Finns, it seemed to him, and the Permians spoke almost the same language' — direct word order

Felaspella him saedon pa Beormas aeзper зе of hiera азnin lanth-3e of рззт landum pe ymb hie utan wasron 'many stories told him (lit. "him told") the Permians either about their own land or about the lands that were around them' — the objects spella, him are placed at the beginning; the order of the subject and predicate is inverted and the attention is focussed on the part of the sentence which describe the content of the stories.

Nevertheless the freedom of word order and its seeming in dependence of grammar should not be overestimated. The order of word • could depend on the communicative type of the sentence — question versus statement, on the type of clause, on the presence and place of some secondary parts of the sentence.

Inversion was used for grammatical purposes in questions; full in­version with simple predicates and partial—with compound predi­cates, containing link-verbs and modal verbs:

Hwanon feriзeap зе faette scyldas? 'From where do you bring (lit. "bring you")_ornamented shields?'

Eart pa Esau, mln sunu? 'Are you Esau, my son?'

Hwaet sceal ic sin^on? 'What shall I sing?' "

If the sentence began with an adverbial modifier, the word order was usually inverted; cf. some common beginnings of yearly entries in the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES:

Her cuotn se here to Readin3um... 'In this year came that army to Reading'.

Her on pyssum зeаге for se micla here... 'in this year went that big army' with a relatively rare instance of direct word order after her:

her Cynewulf benam Si3ebryht his rices ond Westseaxna wiotan for unryhtum daedum, buton Hamtunscire 'In this year Cynewulf and the councillors of Wessex deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom for his wicked deeds, except Hampshire (note also the separation of the two coordinate subjects Cynewulf and wiotan).

A peculiar type of word order is found in many subordinate and in some coordinate clauses: the clause begins with the subject following the connective, and ends with the predicate or its finite part, I the secondary parts being enclosed between them. Recall the quotation:

Ohthere saede his hlaforde, AElfrede суninзе paet he ealra Nordmonna fpinest biide But the very next sentence the text shows that in a similar clause the predicate could be placed to the subject:

H6 cwaep peet he bude on рneт lande, norpweardum wip pa Westsae

I said that he lived on the land to the North of the Atlantic ocean'. In the following passage the predicate is placed in final position both in the subordinate and coordinate clauses:

AEfter рaem pe he hie oferwunnen haefde, he for on Bretanie paet lotid, and wiз pa Brettas зefeaht, and 3efliemed wearb 'After he had me them, he went to Britain, that island, and against those Britons fought and was put to flight'. (Note also the place of the object hie-objects were often placed before the predicate or between two of the predicate.)

Those were the main tendencies in OE word order. They can be regarded as rigid rules, for there was much variability in syntactic patterns. The quotations given above show that different types of word order could be used in similar syntactical conditions. It appears that many respects OE syntax was characterised by a wide range of variation and by the co-existence of various, sometimes even opposing, tendencies.