 In Middle English, continuations of some old English word order patterns different from those of present-day English can be found. The trend, however, was towards modern word order. This lecture illustrates how the basic word order of Middle English was realized and seeks to provide a precise syntactic typology of Middle English. So as usual, we will look at the main word order patterns in Middle English. We will discuss the central head modifier sequences in Middle English, and we will use examples. Now the examples in this e-lecture that help us to illustrate the syntax of Middle English come from Barber's book The English Language, a historical introduction, or they have simply been taken directly from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Let us look at some sentences of Middle English first. Now our first example illustrates that in Middle English the subject-object verb pattern was possible. E hem forward is clearly an S-O-V structure where we have marked the subject in red, the object in blue, and the verb in green. Our second example shows that the S-V-O pattern, as in he tackles his leaf, was clearly a possible pattern in Middle English. An example number three is an example where we have an O-V-S pattern. But hodh werd he known, and quite interestingly the object here is split, hodh werd he known, and the subject clearly follows the verb. The last example on this screen is, dus tauchte me me dame, and clearly here we have a V-O-S structure that is typical in construction where the first element is an adverbial, dus tauchte the verb, me, object, and me dame the subject. These examples show that despite the progressive impoverishment of inflection, word order in Middle English was still very flexible, and often allowed more options than in present day English as to where to place the main elements of clause structure, subject, verb, and object. However, the tendency towards a more rigid word order increased through the Middle English period as inflections got lost. By late Middle English, the majority of sentences exhibit word orders that would be completely acceptable in present day English, and the SVO pattern was increasingly established as the standard type. So let's look at these central word order patterns that were used in Middle English. Now here are the first two cases, and perhaps you can try a syntactic analysis on your own. So stop the video if you like, and then compare your solution with mine. Now the word order in these two sentences, of course, was an SVO pattern, thin astrolabe hath a ring to put in on the tome, thin astrolabe clearly the subject, hath the verb, a ring, is the object. And in the contour of Ethiopia, they slain here a children before and here a goddess. Again, SVO, they, the subject, slain, kill, the verb, here a children, the object. Here are further examples. Now we know the second one already, e him forward is clearly SOV, and the same applies to the subordinate clause structure, where in if a man will say harmer, we have the same structure, a man is the subject, will and harmer the verb. By the way, will and harmer form a so-called brace construction or verbal bracket, which is interrupted by the object they. Now last but not least, we have these two patterns. Gaf, here the chilled anything, an interrogative sentence. Now the VSO order, which you can find here. The VSO order was the rule in Middle English interrogative clauses, which as in old English allowed the simple inversion subject verb to become verb subject. In standard declaratives, it was only found in sentences with adverbial fronting for fenne mot ha fengken of the kus fodder. Now in this sentence for then the adverbial must she think of the kus fodder of the kus food for then is of course the adverbial, and then the verb must mot follows and then the rest. So here we have a VSO pattern and again the verb forms a verbal bracket interrupted by the subject. Further word order patterns in Middle English all appear, however they are relatively rare, especially in prose. So let's look at this pattern first. Here we have an OSV pattern, object-subject verb, with special emphasis on the quantifier that is part of the object. Husbunzat chir ti dore i havat fever, object-subject verb, and then part of the object at the end. Now the second pattern is an example of VOS, with a verb in the second position due to the initial adverbial dus. Dus stauchne me midame, we already discussed this sentence on the previous screen. VOS. Well in the last example which I have here, clothes have they known? Well here we have an OVS structure with special emphasis on the quantifier that is part of the object just like in the first example. They have no clothes would be a present-day English version. As a first summary all possible orders occurred in Middle English, at least occasionally. Yet despite the high degree of freedom of word order the subject tended to be placed before the object. So the orders behind me became increasingly unlikely in Middle English. And then there were the so-called impersonal constructions. Now Middle English had a number of so-called impersonal verbs, that is verbs without an OVS subject, but with a topic expressed in the accusative or dative case. The number of such constructions increased in Middle English. Let's look at them in detail. Here is one of them. Now if you look at the first clause, me thristed Sarah, then we can provide the following analysis. Clearly, thristed is the verb, and me, well me, is an object. That's the first case. And Sarah then is an adverbial which we can ignore in this particular case. Let's look at another example. Me dream it, that he was led to Durham. And again we are going to look at the first clause. And we have a similar case. Me dream it, me is an object. And of course dream it is the verb. Here is the last group of our examples of impersonal constructions. This is a case with an OVS subject, but the OVS subject was empty or the impersonal dummy subject, it. So let's provide the analysis. First, liquide is of course the verb, well is an adverbial. Then the is an object which means you. And this time we have a subject which is of course hit. In these constructions the object which was the topic in each case. So let's mark the topic in, with this color, was in the first sentence me, in the second sentence me, and in the third sentence it was thee. So these were the topics. And this is what happened. As more and more SVO structures with OVS subjects were used, and this word order pattern became more and more fixed. These impersonal constructions gradually evolved into personal constructions with their subjects in the nominative case. So this is how they were reinterpreted. Me thristed became I thirsted. Me dreamt became I dreamed or dreamt. And fe likede became the likede. Later you liked. Now of course we know that I thirsted died out in the early days of present. The English today would say I am thirsty, but in all these cases we have a typical case of syntactic reinterpretation, where an exceptional construction was changed by analogy with a majority of the cases. The non-subject topic in each case was reinterpreted as the new subject to align this word order with the majority of the cases where Middle English exhibited the SVO pattern. Let's now look at head modifier structures. In Middle English both head modifier and modifier head patterns were used. Now here is the first case where we have typical head modifier sequences. For example prepositions on his stead, stead means horse. Prepositions are heads within prepositional phrases. Or noun-adjective patterns, where the noun, the head precedes the adjective and heaven indivisible or show resorter the sweet shores in the second case. But at the same time there were also modifier head patterns. So there were still some postpositions. He said to him too, or adjective noun patterns, an earthly servant, great heavy renter. So in these cases the adjective precedes its head the noun. So again like word order patterns there were tendencies towards a head modifier sequence but essentially all possible ordering patterns still occurred. And in sentences like in Old English, Middle English, prose favored coordination rather than heavy sub-ordination. Thus the clauses within coordinate structures were preferably linked by simple coordinators such as and, so, and than, than means then rather than by sub-ordinating conjunctions such as that team, that, when, if, which means if and for thee, which means for or because, these were confined to subordinate clauses. In poetry the syntax of Middle English was essentially the same as in prose. However, to meet the requirements of rhyme, poets were likely to use inversions that is VS verb subject ordering patterns more frequently than was typical of prose. Over and above these basic properties of sentence structure there were a number of interesting additional syntactic aspects of Old English such as the use of the subjunctive or the use of double negation. Now if you want to analyze further syntactic patterns of Middle English syntax consult the Middle English entry in the virtual linguistics campus language index and look at the details. Well, here it is. Now in this section morphology and syntax of the language index entry you have access to two texts. The first one is an excerpt from Ankrenne Wisse, a text written around 1200. And the second one is an excerpt from the Canterbury Tales, a series of tales about sex, marriage and nobility written by Geoffrey Chaucer around 1400. And as usual, you have access to the translation that is a transliteration. You have access to a syntactic analysis of that text in terms of syntactic functions and some additional features like the use of the brace of the verbal bracket, split objects and so on and so forth. Well, let's summarize. Middle English syntax still was in many ways far more flexible than present-day English. Its word order was more flexible and phrasal patterns allowed more variation. However, by the end of the Middle English period a tendency towards SVO in main declarative sentences had become dominant and prepositions had become the central means of realizing ad positions. So by and large Middle English could be classified as an SVO language where alternative patterns were used, but these had become more and more exceptional. And then there were patterns beyond word order, which were still very much different from present-day English. One of them concerns the structure of the verb phrase and the choice of the elements within it. In a follow-up e-lecture about the syntax of early modern English, we will discuss these and other developments that began in Middle English and continued during the early modern English period. So, see you again soon.