ABSTRACT |
The earlier stages of the English language reveal a wide variety of
functions of conjunction and, the borderline between coordination
and subordination being often blurred. As Traugott states (1992: 220),
“hypotaxis translates fairly readily into subordination” in Old English,
a fact which is corroborated by the element order of the ensuing
sentence, as the sequence subject + (object) + verb is
characteristically subordinate (Mitchell 1985: 694). In light of this,
the word-order of Old English coordinate clauses will be investigated in
order to a) obtain statistical data about their syntax; and b) determine
whether, as suggested elsewhere in the scholarly literature, there is a
particular pattern depending on the type of coordination; and c) whether
the syntactic ordering of ond-clauses is subject to authorial
preferences. From a methodological perspective, an annotated corpus
containing the Old English Holy Gospels is analysed and, by using
the Old English Concordancer (Miranda et al. 2006: 81-98),
all the instances were automatically retrieved and arranged in terms of
element order.
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