General Characteristics of Early New English Syntax:

– Word order becomes fixed and subjects become obligatory

– Auxiliaries are used more (=grammaticalization) and are contracted

– Do is becoming obligatory in questions and negatives

– Multiple negation is reduced

– Punctuation is becoming syntactically motivated

 

 

4. MODERN ENGLISH SYNTAX

 

 

The word order of New English is SVO, with Verb-fronting in questions. Subjects are obligatory, except in the phenomenon of topic-drop, typical for e-mail and letters and demonstrated in (1). In topic-drop typically a first person pronoun is left out:

1) Would like to see you soon.

The number of auxiliaries, prepositions, and determiners has increased since the Early New English period.

Through grammaticalization, many new modal and future forms are introduced in the New English period. Gonna is used as a future auxiliary, even though the OED says it is “colloq. (esp. U.S.) or vulgar pronunciation of going to”. The OED’s first listing is 1913. Krug (2000) provides historical background and modern instances of gonna, gotta, hafte, and wanna. The OED’s first use of going to as a future auxiliary is 1482, but gonna is not used until much later.

Currently, only have is used as a perfect auxiliary; however, be is still used as a present perfect auxiliary with motion verbs in the Early New English period, and this still occurs in the 19th century, as (2) shows:

2) But before I am run away with by my feelings...

Before 1800, it is also possible to say I have seen it yesterday, as it is in a number of other languages and varieties; later this changes and currently only I saw it yesterday is used.

The progressive use of be and -ing is introduced relatively late; sentences such as as I say now continue until 1800. Before that, grammars and dictionaries do not mention be+ing as a separate form. When the progressive appears, often a preposition (on reduced to a-) precedes the participle, as in (3):

3) I think my wits are a wool -gathering.

Progressives are also combined with other auxiliaries; for example, in (4) the progressive is combined with a passive. In earlier English, a progressive passive is expressed as in (5):

4) The house was being built.

5) The house was building.

The regular passive is constructed with the auxiliary be, as in (6), but a newer form using get also arises, as in (7):

6) She was hit by a wave of familiarity.

7) Then he got knocked out.

According to the OED, the get-passive is first used in 1652.

Analytic languages make use of grammatical words derived from lexical verbs or prepositions. We saw that to comes to mark the indirect object and also that a clause is non-finite. Another case of grammaticalization is the preposition like becoming a complementizer: it goes from introducing a noun to introducing a sentence:

8) Winston tastes good like a good cigarette should.

Consistent with this is the use of like to introduce quotes, as in (8). This is called a quotative.

Like (and sort of, kind of, and all) is also used to soften requests or to hedge something. These are then called discourse markers or mood markers, since they tell you a lot about the speaker’s attitudes.

Relatives also undergo change in New English and, the preference of speakers for that over who/whom/which is expected in an analytic language. Relative pronouns show much variation throughout the history of English; the changes they undergo are stopped in two ways by language-external, prescriptive forces: these prescriptive forces dictate the choice of the relative and impose restriction on stranding prepositions.

In New English restrictive relatives are formed by using that or a wh-pronoun, as in (9); the relatively infrequent, non-restrictive relatives are formed by using a wh- pronoun, as in (10):

9) The person that/who I met.

10) Jane Austen, whose sentences were used above, was a Modern English writer.

The wh-pronoun shows case and is therefore more synthetic: who, whose, and whom are nominative, genitive, and accusative/dative, respectively. In New English, there is a strong tendency to use that (and as), rather than wh-pronouns, or to have no marker at all. This is so because the wh-pronoun shows case and the language learner does not have much evidence for assuming case distinctions are relevant in English.

The preference for that can be shown using a corpus of spoken English. Differences between spoken and written varieties always indicate that prescriptive rules are at work; such rules are typically followed only in the written, more formal variety. In the 2-million Corpus of Spoken Professional American English, or CSE, that is much more frequent than the wh-form.

In Early New English punctuation was seen to perform several functions. In New English, punctuation is used to indicate the main players in the sentence: subject, verb, and object. Many times, adverbs or relative clauses, if they are out of place or provide background information and are indicated by commas. In the (non-politically correct) (11), the difference in comma placement makes a difference in the meaning (the commas are left out, but experiment a little):

11) Woman without her man is like a fish on a bicycle.