While there has been some two-hundred years of research on Old English (OE) syntax, comparatively little of this aims at large-scale comparisons of verse and prose word order. Recent digitization of many OE texts, including poetic works, provides new tools for the explicit comparison of OE verse and prose texts; however, a thorough investigation of poetic syntax demands attention to poetic form. Investigating several aspects of clausal word order in OE verse, Pintzuk (2001) concludes that “metrical constraints outranked syntactic constraints in the poetry” and that “further investigation of the limits of metrical constraints [is] necessary” (2). My study addresses that need by providing a corpus-based comparison of OE verse and prose syntax, specifically of noun phrase (NP) word order, and with reference to verse structure. NP modifiers included in my analysis are possessive pronouns, common and proper noun genitives, adjectives, participles, quantifiers, and demonstratives.
For my analysis, I consider NP word order variation in the York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry and the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, making use of TIGERSearch corpus search software. Because of the effects of syntactic weight on word order, I control for this factor. Then, for the OE poetic text of Beowulf, I also consider how NP word order relates to metrical structure, alliteration, and NP position within the line as well as linguistic factors such as animacy and the presence of compounds in the NP.
My findings suggest several differences between OE verse and prose syntax in terms of overall frequencies of different NP types and word order patterns, especially as related to the relative frequency of postnominal modifiers. In particular, syntactic weight is an important factor in determining prose word order, but this factor plays a different role in verse. Specifically, while syntactically light NPs prefer prenominal position in OE prose, this is not always the case in verse. Furthermore, NPs with fewer modifiers are more common in verse, and consistently, postnominal modifiers are more common in OE verse than in prose. However, closer examination of these forms within their metrical context suggests that contrary to Pintzuk’s claims, instead of verse constraints consistently outranking syntactic constraints, both metrical and syntactic constraints are constantly in tension in the construction of OE verse. And while frequencies of different NP types vary between OE verse and prose, often as a function of these metrical constraints and stylistic considerations, NP word orders in verse are consistently also found in OE prose, if at
considerably lower frequencies. Furthermore, variations in NP word order in verse sometimes represent stylistic flourishes or subtle differences of meaning. It is argued that an awareness of more common NP word orders as well as more marked forms aids in the interpretation of OE literary texts.
Considering this aspect of OE syntactic structure, I explore one facet of OE poetry, as a dense form of human expression that is tied with more everyday forms of the language of the period. Studying OE texts in this way provides a unique historical perspective, addressing a previously understudied area of the history the English language and English literature.