Syntactical Relations and Means of Expressing Them

Four types of syntactical relations are distinguished:

a) predicative (between the subject and the predicate):

Ic eom Ēsau (I am Esau)

b) attributive (between the attribute and the noun or pronoun):

dēop wæter (deep water)

c) objective (between the verb and its object):

sin™ mē (заспівай мені)

d) adverbial (between the verb and the adverb):

sin™ mē nū (заспівай мені зараз)

The system of syntactical relations is stable. It is the means of expressing syntactical relations that vary from language to language and change in the course of historical development of certain language. Grammatical forms, form words and word order belong to the grammatical means. As distinguished from Modern English grammatical forms served as important means of expressing syntactical relations. Usually case forms distinctly signalized the subordinate position of the word, similarly forms of conjugation expressed the relation of one word to another used as a subject.

Concord (agreement) – is the means of expression the predicative and attributive relations:

Ic bidde (I pray) – predicative relation

Þæm Deniscum scipum (Dat. Pl.) (to the Danish ships) – attributive relation

Ūs ēallum (to all of us)

Government – is the principal means of expressing the completive relations between the object and the verb it refers to. Government may be direct in case the verb requires a certain case form of the object, which refers to this verb. Or it may be indirect when this is done by means of a preposition:

Brin™ me mete of huntoe (Принеси мені м’яса з полювання)

Eft cwæ Ēsau tō his sunu (Тоді запитав Iсай свого сина)

Government is also observed if a noun is modified by another noun:

hwales bān (whales bone)

fu™ela feer (Genit. Pl.) (пір’я птахів)

The role of the “outer” means of expressing syntactical relations is much less important in OE as compared to Mod.E.

Prepositions serve not so much as a grammatical means of expressing a dependent position of the noun (numeral, pronoun) but greatly as a means of specifying these relations. In many cases we find that there is no preposition:

Þæt weorc is swie plēolic me (This work is very risky for me)