On the Diachronic Development of the Syntax of Clauses in the English Language

Abstract

The English language has gone through significant changes from Old English (450–1150) through Middle English (c. 1150–1500) and Early Modern English (1500-1750) to Modern English (1750–present) by becoming an analytic language from a synthetic language rich in inflections. Instead of inflections Present-Day English makes intensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs and depends upon word order to indicate syntactic relations in a sentence. The present paper discusses how English advanced from the free word order of Old English to the relatively fixed word order that is used in Present-Day English by touching upon noun declension, inversion and fronting, quoting examples from literature and popular culture.