The Development from Case-forms to Prepositional Constructions in Old English Prose

Download or read book The Development from Case-forms to Prepositional Constructions in Old English Prose written by Kiriko Sato and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development from a synthetic to an analytic language is one of the most important topics in English historical syntax. This development is reflected in the gradual decrease of case-forms and the replacement of their functions with equivalent prepositional constructions. Focussing on the Old English period, when case-forms and prepositional constructions overlapped in various functions, this book aims to answer an unresolved question: was there a significant change in the use of case-forms and, alternatively, in the use of prepositions plus case-forms in contexts where both types were possible? The author makes a statistical comparison between prose texts written in the early Old English period and texts of the later Old English period; she also takes into account stylistic features of individual texts. Thus, this book addresses this Old English syntactic issue both from a historical and a stylistic perspective and shows the stages of development during the Old English period.