Shores David L. A Descriptive Syntax of the Peterborough Chronicle from 1122-1154

Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 1971. — 229 p. — (Janua Linguarum. Series Practica 103).Over seventy years ago Otto Jespersen, the great Danish scholar, noted the neglect of syntax in historical studies of the English language.1 At just about the same time, C. Alphonso Smith in the opening sentence of his study of word order of Alfred's Orosius and jElfric's Homilies wrote that few subjects "have been so persistently slighted as that of the position of words and clauses". It would seem that after such urging, studies of syntax would abound, but Etsko Kruisinga as late as 1926 remarked that it was "strange that there should be no book of any type, whether advanced or elementary, on Old English syntax". Still later, George W. Small observed that syntactic research in Old English was so lacking that scholars had failed to produce an adequate method of conducting it.4 A chief reason for this neglect perhaps has been the belief that Old English was a highly inflectional and synthetic language which showed the various relationships within clauses and sentences predominantly by the variations of the forms of words. That is, inflection was the primary signal and almost autonomous, and syntax was based on it.