Word order and linear modification in English
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2009 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Brno Studies in English |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | word order; linear modification; development of English; functional sentence perspective |
| Description | The paper examines the role of linear modification in the syntactic structure of an English sentence. Linear modification – the principle of presenting ideas in an order of gradual rise in importance – co-determines word order in all Indo-European languages, though it is less powerful in languages with fixed word order than in languages with flexible word order. The syntactic structure of an English sentence has undergone dramatic changes within the last one thousand years. The shift from flexible word order to fixed word order, which was closely related to certain phonological and morphological features of English, was accompanied by a reduction of the power of linear modification as a word-order principle. The paper illustrates this gradual loss of power of linear modification on examples of Old and Modern English texts. It also pays attention to the position of linear modification among word order principles and its position among the factors of functional sentence perspective |
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