Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

50 Kristin Bech
course of time, and also how the differences between coordinate and non-
coordinate clauses relate to word order. In other words, the focus here is on
word order from a functional perspective.
2. Material and method
2.1 The corpus
The corpus on which this work is based consists of 5,000 main clauses from Old
and Middle English prose texts; 1,250 from each of the four periods: early Old
English (870–950), late Old English (950–1150), early Middle English (1150–1350)
and late Middle English (1350–1500). The clauses have been excerpted from
19 different texts, four from the early OE period and five from each of the other
periods. 2 A list of the texts, including the number of clauses taken from each text,
is given in the references, together with their abbreviated reference forms.
2.2 The word order patterns
The word order patterns that will be discussed here are the XVS, SVX and XSV
patterns. In the XVS word order, there is one initial X element, followed immediately
by the verb. The subject usually follows the verb, and it may in turn be
followed by other clause elements. Clauses in which the verb is followed by one
or more X elements, and with the subject in a later position, are also included
in this pattern, i.e., XVXS order. If the verb phrase is complex, the finite and the
non-finite verb need not be contiguous; it is the finite verb that needs to occur in
second position. In (1), the clause starts with the subject complement non richere,
followed by the finite verb:
(1) and non richere shal on man ben than anothir
“and no richer shall one man be than another” (Mandeville 97: 10)
In SVX clauses the first clause element is the subject, followed immediately by the
verb, and usually by one or more X elements, which may be objects, adverbials,
subject complements, and, occasionally, object complements. In this pattern are
2. The texts were selected in a ‘quasi-random’ manner. I chose texts that represent different
genres and different periods, but I did not check the texts for particular word order aspects
before I started extracting the clauses. Furthermore, I did not always start the extraction of the
clauses at the very beginning of the text.