COORDINATION, SUBORDINATION, AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY: AN INQUIRY INTO ASPECTS OF THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN SYNTAX AND STYLE

The dissertation considers the use of syntax in Old English poetry as a means of achieving poetic and rhetorical effects; the emphasis is on coordinate and subordinate clauses, and on the methods of combining them into larger syntactic units. The poems chosen of study are representative of the various types of Old English poetry: Beowulf, Juliana, and Judith for the secular and religious epics; The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer for the religious and the elegaic strains in the lyric tradition. The first step, in the chapters dealing with Beowulf and Juliana, is to differentiate between the sentence structures characteristic of narration and those characteristic of the poetic depiction of speech; the latter category further bifurcates into the structures characteristic of formal oratory and those belonging to a more informal context. Next, in dealing with The Dream of the Rood, attention is given to the syntactic structures characteristically used in the depiction of thought. Emphasis is on the way they differ from those of speech and narration in their greater complexity and in their tendency toward more elaborate and ornamental, as opposed to straightforward, syntactic patterns. The Wanderer and The Seafarer, taken together, represent the elegaic element in Old English poetry; their syntax is studied for the manner in which its structures are deployed to suggest feeling, rather than thought. The syntax of these poems is distinguished from that of narrative by its less explicit coordination of the independent clauses, and by a general vagueness of the connections between ideas; the syntax also differs from that depicting thought by a preference for coordination, however informal, over subordination, and by a preference for less elaborate syntactic patterns. In the concluding chapter, the syntax of the religious epic Judith is used as the subject of an attempt at preliminary quantification of some of the ideas discusses in the earlier chapters. Clauses are examined in terms of the length (in half-lines) and density (in words per half-line), with an eye to determining whether these factors change according to context. Evidence would seem to indicate that they do, thus bearing out the original contention of this study, that there is a distinct relationship between the syntactic structures employed in a poetic passage and the poetic effects that the passage achieves