The word order of Old English and Old High German non-conjoined declarative clauses in different text types

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to compare word-order patterns of two West Germanic languages, English and High German, at the early stage of their development, on the example of one clause type, namely non-conjoined declarative clauses. The word-order patterns have been analysed for three basic text types (poetry, authentic prose and translated prose) in order to check whether text type has a similar influence on word order of those closely related languages. The paper is a fragment of a more detailed Ph. D. project entitled: A corpus-based comparative study of Old English and Old High German word order in different text types (to be completed in 2009). The most interesting results of the first stage of the study have been presented here. All details and aspects of the analysis which have not been included in the presents paper (e.g. word order of other clause types, the behaviour of objects and complex verb phrases) can be found in the forthcoming dissertation.