The Simple Sentence

§ 216. The following examples show the structure of the simple sentence in OE, its principal and secondary parts:

Sōðlice sum mann hæfdetwēʒen suna (mann — subject, hæfde — Simple Predicate) ‘truly a certain man had two sons’. Predicates could also be compound: modal, verbal and nominal:

Hwæðre pū meaht sinʒan ‘nevertheless you can sing’.

He was swӯðe spediʒ mann ‘he was a very rich man’. The secondary parts of the sentence are seen in the same examples: tweʒen suna ‘two sons’ — Direct Object with an attribute, spēdiʒ ‘rich’ — attribute. In the examples of verb and noun patterns above we can find other secondary parts of the sentence: indirect and prepositional objects, adverbial modifiers and appositions: hys mēder ‘to his mother’ (Indirect Object), tō his suna ‘to his son’ (Prep. Object). his hlāforde, Ælfrēde cyninʒe ‘his lord king Alfred’ (apposition), etc. The structure of the OE sentence can be described in terms of Mod E syntactic analysis, for the sentence was made up of the same parts, except that those parts were usually simpler. Attributive groups were short and among the parts of the sentence there were very few predicative constructions ("syntactical complexes"). Absolute constructions with the noun in the Dat. case were sometimes used in translations from Latin in imita­tion of the Latin Dativus Absolutus. The objective predicative con­struction "Accusative with the Infinitive" occurred in original OE texts:

... ðā liðende land ʒesāwon,

brimclifu blican, beorʒas stēape (BĒOWULF)

‘… the travellers saw land, the cliffs shine, steep mountains’.

Predicative constructions after habban (NE have)contained a Past Participle (see the examples in § 198).

§ 217. The connection between the parts of the sentence was shown by the form of the words as they had formal markers for gender, case, number and person. As compared with later periods agreement and government played an important role in the word phrase and in the sentence. Accordingly the place of the word in relation to other words was of secondary importance and the order of words was relatively free (see § 223 ff).

The presence of formal markers made it possible to miss out some parts of the sentence which would be obligatory in an English sentence now. In the following instance the subject is not repeated but the form of the predicate shows that the action is performed by the same person as the preceding action:

pā com hē on morʒenne tō pæm tūn-ʒerefan sē pe his ealdorman wæs; sæʒde him, hwylce ʒife hē onfēnʒ ‘then in the morning he came to the town-sheriff the one that was his alderman; (he) said to him what gift he had received’.

The formal subject was lacking in many impersonal sentences (though it was present in others); cf.:

Norpan snӯwde ‘it snowed in the North’;

him pūhte ‘it seemed to him’;

Hit haʒolade stānum ‘it hailed with stones’.

§ 218. One of the conspicuous features of OE syntax was multiple negation within a single sentence or clause. The most common negative particle was ne, which was placed before the verb; it was often accom­panied by other negative words, mostly nāht or nōht (which had devel­oped from ne plus ā-wiht ‘no thing’). These words reinforced the mean­ing of negation:

Ne con ic nōht sinʒan... ic nāht sinʒan ne cūðe ‘I cannot sing’ (lit. "cannot sing nothing"), ‘I could not sing’ (nōht was later shortened to not, a new negative particle).

Another peculiarity of OE negation was that the particle ne could be attached to some verbs, pronouns and adverbs to form single words:

...hē ne mihte nān ping ʒesēon ‘he could not see anything’ (nān from ne ān 'not one')

hit nā būton ʒewinne næs 'it was never without war' (næs from ne wæs 'no was'; NE none, never, neither are traces ofsuch forms).