Syntactical Changes in
English
Dr. Muhammad Shahbaz
The nature of language change
Language change is inevitable,
universal, continuous and, to a
considerable degree, regular
a n d s y s t e m a t i c .
Syntactic change
Rule loss
In Old English, there was a morphosyntactic rule of adjective agreement,
according to which, the endings of
adjectives must agree with the head
noun in case, number, and gender. But
this syntactic rule has been lost in
m o d e r n
E n g l i s h .
Rule addition
The particle movement rule is a syntactic rule
added to Modern English. This rule allows the
particle in some phrasal verbs to be shifted to
the right of the object. This particle movement
is impossible in Old English. For example:
A: He switched off the light.
B: He switched the light off.
Rule change
Major rule changes in the structure of
English sentences took place in their word
orders. In Middle English, “not” was added
to the end of an affirmative sentence to make
it negative. But in Modern English, the
negation is often made with “not” inserted
between the auxiliary verb and the main verb.
F o r
e x a m p l e :
I deny it not.
I do not deny it.
Old English had an elaborate case-marking
system. The grammatical functions were
well revealed with case markers. This
system made the word order of Old English
more variable than that of Modern English.
For example, the word orders in Old
English included SVO,VSO, SOV and
OSV, but Modern English has lost the
majority of case markers, therefore a basic
word order of SVO has to be followed.
Morpho-Syntactic Changes
 Question
formation
 Negative sentence formation
 Case endings
 Verbs
 Other examples
Morpho-Syntactic Changes
B. Morpho- syntactic changes
(Nash 108-11; Yule 221)
1. Q formation (Nash 108)
2. negative sentence formation (Nash 109)
3. case endings (Nash 109-110)
Nouns (marked with suffixes)
 who/ whom questions: (Nash 108)
e.g. I don’t know who/whom to give it to.
(“whom”: mainly in formal speech and writing)

A remnant still in the
process of changing
Other remnants: other pronoun
forms (e.g., I/me, he/ him,
she/her), plural forms.
Morpho-Syntactic Changes
4. verbs:
examples: (from Elgin 211)
ic cepe
ðu cepest
he
heo
cepeð
hit
we cepað
ge cepað
hi cepað
“I keep”
“you keep”
he
she keeps
it
“we keep”
“you keep”
“they keep”
Morpho-Syntactic Changes
 Old
English vs Modern English
Here men vndurstonden ofte by this nyght the night of synne
here men understood
often by this night the night of sin
Morpho-Syntactic Changes
 Modern
English:
auxiliary verb raises to Tense
 main verb stays in VP
 result: main verb follows adverbs: John often
went skiing.

 French:
auxiliary verb raises to Tense
 main verb raises to Tense
 result: verb (aux or main) precedes adverbs:
John went often skiing

Morpho-Syntactic Changes
5. Other examples:
Old English about 7th century to 11th century (1066)
1. 8 forms of “the” (Nash 110):
2. example (Framkin and Rodman)
“The Man Slew the King” (6 possible word order in Old Eng.)
a. se man sloh ðone cyning.
b. ðone cyning sloh se man.
c. se man ðone cyning sloh.
d. ðone cyning se man sloh.
e. sloh se man ðone cyning.
f. sloh ðone cyning se man.
Comparisons:
The man slew the king.
The king slew the man.
Therefore, word order matters
se: definite article only with
subject
ðone: definite article only
with object. So, with the
article (& suffixes), word
order wasn’t so
important— but now word
order (and preposition, too)
is crucial in modern English.
Morpho-Syntactic Changes

This change (reduction of Eng. inflections)
related to Great Vowel Shift (phonological
change)—which made it hard to distinguish
the endings—necessitated other changes in
order for the lang. to remain clear &
processible, also quick & easy, & expressive
(which could also be related to processes of
child lang. acquisition) so, suffixes dropped
out, Eng. word order becomes stricter and
prepositions become more important.