Investigating Determinants of Word Order in a Database of Old English Poetry

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The verse syntax has generally been considered much looser than that of the prose since, for example, word order in verse might be modified by the requirements of the meters and formulas. Momma (1997) argued for a much stricter prosodical syntax However, even under Momma's rules, there still seems to be much freedom, even apparent randomness, in the word order of the modal auxiliary (M) and non-finite verb (V).Another approach to the composition of Old English poetry is the oral-formulaic theory proposed by scholars such as Magoun (1953). A recent study along these lines is Ogura (2006), who investigates the Meters of Boethius and concludes that they are so formulaic as to fit the mould of Anglos-Saxon poetry. Again, within this formulaic theory, both MV and VM orders can be found, apparently pretty randomly.The purpose of this project is to investigate the relationship between verse and prose syntax in Old English by examining constructions with complex predicates in both verse and pr … More ose in Old English. The results suggest that verse syntax is tighter than has so far been acknowledged. The results of my earlier study (Suzuki 2004)indicated that alliteration is in fact the crucial factor in determining the MV/VM word order in subordinate clauses of Beowulf.In this project I seek to apply this theory regarding the importance of alliteration in determining word order across a more comprehensive corpus of Old English verse and a wider variety of auxiliary types : modal constructions, participle constructions, and infinitive constructions. This project thus attempts to verify whether the tendencies observed in Beowulf can also be discerned in the other texts, pointing to their applicability to Old English verse as a whole. The results confirm these tendencies. A further purpose of this project is to create a new database specifically designed for exploring the word order determinants in Old English poetry. This database is still a work in progress and should be complet.ed in a year or so. Less