On the use of ond-clauses in the Old English gospels

摘要

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 conclusive results 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. In addition, our study analyses whether the syntactic ordering of ond-clauses is subject to authorial preferences; whether there is any kind of correlation between the (dis)continuity of subject and the syntactic ordering of the ond-clause; and whether there is a connection between word order and the type of punctuation marks used. From a methodological perspective, an annotated corpus containing the Old English Holy Gospels is analysed and, by using the Old English Concordancer (Miranda-Garca et al. 2006: 81-98), all the instances were automatically retrieved and arranged in terms of element order in the ond-clause.