An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

part of the discussion with this type of issue before moving on in
Chapter 7 to a discussion of sentence types and word order.
6.2 The noun phrase
The most basic syntactic elements in the noun phrase relate to case
and number; gender, too, has a role in agreement phenomena. Since the
biggest difference in these areas between Old and present-day English
lies in the role of case, it is appropriate to start the discussion there.
Today nouns never show case inflection. Consider a sentence such as:
(1) The woman gave the man the book
and compare that with its Old English equivalent:
(2)
T
æt wı
¯
f g
.
eaf
t
æ¯m menn 
t
a¯ bo¯c
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There, as can be seen by the three different forms of the demonstrative
article, each noun phrase has a different case, nominative, accusative and
dative. It might be thought that today there is one situation where there
is nominal inflection:
(3) The woman’s book
Compare to that:
(4)
T
æs wı¯fes bo¯c
I shall return to such Old English genitives later, but there is good reason
for supposing that in the present-day language the ’s is no longer an
inflection, but a clitic which is attached to an immediately-preceding
noun phrase. If, therefore, I have to distinguish between the Old English
construction and the present-day one, I shall do so by referring not to the
Old English genitive but to the present-day possessive. The present-day
possessive is, unlike the Old English genitive, not a case inflection, since
it is not attached to a preceding noun, but rather to a whole noun phrase.
Now let’s move on to the details of each case. The simplest order in
which to take them is: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. The
nominative case is the case associated with the subject of a clause, and
hence it is probably self-evident in its usage. Note that, since, unlike in
Latin, there is no vocative case in Old English, the nominative is used for
direct address:
(5) Le¯ofan men, g
.
ecna¯wa
e t
æt so¯
e
is!
dear
men
know that truth is
As I shall discuss later, it is sometimes the case that there is no overt
subject in Old English, but that is not something which concerns us
immediately.
Just as the nominative is usually the sign of the subject, so too the most
frequent, albeit not the only sign, of the direct object is the accusative
case. Sometimes, despite the above, we find examples of a ‘double accus-
ative’, that is to say, where there are two objects and both of them are in
the accusative, but only one would be regarded as the direct object and
the other an indirect object. Thus examples such as:
(6) An subdı¯acon bæd 
t
one ha¯lgan wer [
 ] sumne dæ¯l [] eles
a subdeacon offered the holy man
some part of the oil
A further usage no longer found is the use of the accusative in ex-
pressions of the extent of place and time:
(7) Him wæs ealne weg
.
[
] we¯ste land
To him was all the way waste land
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These constructions lead us on to another feature entirely absent from
the present-day language. From a quite superficial, but traditional, point
of view we can talk, in present-day English, about prepositions govern-
ing nouns, without at all thinking about what such government might
mean. Once we begin to deal with an inflected language such as Old
English, however, the meaning of government has to be elucidated.
We are, of course, entirely comfortable with the concept of verbs
governing their objects. What has to be said now is that it is not only
verbs which govern their objects; the same is also true of prepositions
and their objects. This governance is realised by the case of the governed
object. The majority of Old English prepositions required the dative case
but a few usually required the accusative case, the most common of these
being g
.
eond ‘throughout’,
†
urh ‘through’, ymbe ‘about’ and o
†
‘until’. I keep
using the adjective ‘usually’ because almost every preposition, whatever
the usual case required may be, can govern the dative case as well,
although this generally reflects a difference in meaning.
As distinct from the examples in the previous paragraph, which
concern prepositions which are all fundamentally associated with the
accusative case, there are a great many prepositions which can equally
take either the accusative or the dative case. Such varied usage is
common throughout the Indo-European family, and many present-day
languages which retain a case system have also kept this prepositional
usage. A nearby and obvious example is German. Now this varied usage
is not random, but rather is based on meaning. When a preposition
expresses motion in time and space it governs the accusative case,
whereas when it expresses rest it governs the dative case. There are signs
that this distinction is under threat, although it does not disappear until
the case system itself is being lost.
The variations in prepositional usage which I have just discussed form
only part of a more general feature of Old English government, which
is probably more easily understood in the context of the dative case, to
which I now turn. The use of the dative case which it is easiest for the
modern reader to understand is to supply the function of the indirect
object, as in the following:
(8) Geaf he & sealde 
t
æt betste hors [
] … Aidane 
t
æ¯m bisc
.
eop
[
]
He gave and presented the best horse … to Bishop Aidan
Until towards the end of the period prepositional to¯ is much less used,
except with some verbs of, especially, saying, such as cleopian, cwe
†
an and
sprecan, where the indirect object is animate, as in:
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(9) He¯ cwæ
e
to¯ me¯
he said to me
Of course in present-day English there is a kind of survival of the dative
in examples such as:
(10) She gave me it
(11) She gave the boy a present
but of course here it is position which indicates the indirect and direct
objects.
There is a special use of the dative in Old English to express pos-
session:
(12) … 
t
æt him 
t
æt he¯afod wand for
e
on
e
a¯ flo¯re
so that to him the head fell down to the floor
where the possessive pronoun has been replaced by him in the dative
case. This can be compared with the French construction à la main ‘in
his hand’. It is, of course, true that the French construction is rather
different. But in one crucial respect it is parallel, for it shows the use of
a special construction: possession involving parts of the body. There are
a number of other idiomatic constructions found quite frequently and
which also use the dative case. These can often be viewed as fossilised
idioms, and that is, for example, probably the best way of analysing the
adverbial use of the dative in phrases such as hwı
¯
lum ‘at times’, sume dæg
.
e,
sumum dæg
.
e ‘one day’. The latter phrases occur alongside on
†
isum dæg
.
e
with a preposition and hence double marking of the phrase.
The variation sume dæg
.
e ~ sumum dæg
.
e may be confusing for a moment,
but it leads on to an important general point. When, in §3.3, I presented
the indefinite declension of adjectives, I included an instrumental singu-
lar case. By the Old English period, although the instrumental case
remains in use in some declensional paradigms, it is only vestigial and
can be replaced by the dative, as in the variation I have just given. Never-
theless there are a few important instrumental constructions which
should be noted. Above all, the use of the instrumental in expressions of
cause is one that shows a clear inheritance in the present-day language.
This occurs with both hwy¯ ‘why’ and 
†
y¯ ‘therefore’:
(13) Hwy¯ se¯c
.
e g
.
e …
Why do you seek …
(14)
T
y¯ he cwæ
e
na¯ …
Therefore he said nothing …
Hwy¯ is, of course, the direct ancestor of the present-day why. These
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two forms are usually treated as part of the paradigms of, respectively,
se ‘that’ and hwa¯ ‘who’, and that is entirely reasonable, but their very