# word order in early Modern French or Latin



## Chigch

"and although they lay a quarter of a mile of, yet the peices that lay upon St. Anthonie's steple *were by them dismounted*,"

This is quoted from John Hayward's work, written in 1612.
An interesting feature of this text is that the prepositional phrase precedes the verb, which is awkward in Modern English. 

As for the origin of such a structure, it might be considered as a relic from Old English. However, the number of examples with such a structure was increased after 1500. I suspect whether the increasing of sentences with such a structure was an outcome of the influence of French or Latin of that period (16th~18th). 

Is there anybody knows whether French or Latin of that time had such a structure as mentioned above (Subject + (auxiliary) + PP + verb)?


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## Angelo di fuoco

I cannot speak for medieval French or the use of Latin at that time, but this is a perfectly normal construction even in contemporary German.
Modern French admits the following structure: auxiliary verb (adverb) participle (complement of agent). I'm not sure about 17th century French, but I think that such a construction as in your example might have been possible. 

I have only very basic and unsystematic knowledge of Latin, so you should take the following observation with a grain of salt.
The normal way in Classical Latin is 1) subject (=patient) 2) complement of agent in ablative case usually preceded by the preposition a 3) synthetical passive form without auxiliary verb. E. g. liber a discipulo legitur: the book is read by the pupil. For all I know (I'm not completely sure, in later times the past participle usually preceded the auxiliary verb: "passus et sepultus est".


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## merquiades

With just a cursory look on google searching "sujet + fut par eux + verbe...", the structure you are interested in, I found thousands of examples in French.  See below some sentences from the first page.  Now, it does sound a bit archaic, historic, and stilted, also perhaps dramatic at times but it nevertheless correct in French.  I believe the structure would have been even more common in 1500.

Il paraît probable que Jacquet fut par eux traîtreusement assassiné.
Il fut par eux mis à la porte.
Borget fut par eux recommandé à leur ami Balzac.
Initialement, l'anarchisme fut par eux vécu comme une variation ou un prolongement de la vision qui était la leur de l'Art.
Qu'aussitôt il désigne Daniel Rousseau qui fut par eux arrêté et conduit au corps de garde des gardes chiourmes.
Et lorsqu'Antiochus fut par eux détrôné.
Le village de Bohas qui appartenait aux Coligny fut par eux inféodé, au XIIIe siècle, aux seigneurs de Buenc ou Bohan


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## CapnPrep

Chigch said:


> However, the number of examples with such a structure was increased after 1500.


Just wondering: how do you know this? If it's based on your own corpus work, you could probably adapt your methodology to do the same thing on French texts to see how the trends (if any) line up chronologically.


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## fdb

Angelo di fuoco said:


> but this is a perfectly normal construction even in contemporary German.



This is because in German the verb stands at the end of a subordinate clause. I fail to see how this is of any relevance for English, French or Latin, which do not have this rule.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Remember Hamlet: "Thou hast thy father much offended."
Germanic word order is not at all irrelevant for English, and the cause for the abovementioned word order in English is not necessarily to be looked for in the influence of Latin or its daughter languages. As I said earlier, in Latin the finite verb followed rather than preceded the participle, which is not at all the usual word order in either English or contemporary Romance languages.


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## fdb

Angelo di fuoco said:


> As I said earlier, in Latin the finite verb followed rather than preceded the participle.



Caesar does not agree with you (Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres).


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## Angelo di fuoco

Let's stay within the more relevant Late & Medieval Latin.


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## Angelo di fuoco

fdb said:


> This is because in German the verb stands at the end of a subordinate clause. I fail to see how this is of any relevance for English, French or Latin, which do not have this rule.



You confuse two things. The first thing is the German subordinate clause, where the _finite_ verb stands at the end (and is preceded by non-finite forms like infinitive, past or present participle). The second is the main clause with either compound tenses (Perfect Tense, Pluperfect, Futur II) or a finite verb with an infinitive. A clause like "Ich *werde* meines Amtes *enthoben worden sein*" (finite form, two participles+infinitive and Genitive case complement in between) shows exact syntactical correspondence to the discussed sentence in English.


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## CapnPrep

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Let's stay within the more relevant Late & Medieval Latin.


I would be surprised if Medieval or Renaissance Latin were the trigger for any syntactic changes in English or other living European languages.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Oh, Latin did trigger syntactic changes in Romance languages during Renaissance. Latin was the most prestigious language and the local Romance vernaculars had to go through a process of emancipation first. I won't say Latin influenced the language spoken by peasants, but it certainly had a great impact on the writings (both fiction and non-fiction, prosa and poetry) of educated persons. You would be surprised how much contemporary English influences nominal syntagms in other languages, including Slavic (my own native Russian isn't exempt of that). That certainly did happen during Renaissance at least with Romance languages, both consciously and unconsciously.


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## berndf

fdb said:


> This is because in German the verb stands at the end of a subordinate clause.


It doesn't. In German subordinate clauses the *finite *verb stands at the end, not the main verb. Verbal brackets (which is phenomenon under consideration here) is a different thing and much older than modern German subordinate clause order.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Bernd, I wrote the same thing about the finite verb an hour earlier.


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## CapnPrep

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Oh, Latin did trigger syntactic changes in Romance languages during Renaissance.


Can you give some specific examples of this? I mean syntactic change as in new syntactic structures and word orders that were not possible before (or structures/orders that were revived under the influence of Latin).


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## Angelo di fuoco

I'd have to look for those in specific literature, this will take some time. Mostly it were imitations of Latin syntax within the possibilities of the specific Romance languages.


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## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Bernd, I wrote the same thing about the finite verb an hour earlier.


Sorry, didn't see that.


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## CapnPrep

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Mostly it were imitations of Latin syntax within the possibilities of the specific Romance languages.


OK, I see. I would consider those to be stylistic changes, not changes to the syntactic system. The shift in English usage that Chigch is interested would also be a stylistic shift, since I agree with you that English syntax has always allowed complements to be realized to the left of the participle.

Of course, it is still a valid question to ask if the change in usage was due to some outside influence (I still doubt that Latin has anything to do with it, though). It just becomes harder to argue, since the structure in question already existed within the original grammar.


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## Chigch

> Just wondering: how do you know this? If it's based on your own corpus work, you could probably adapt your methodology to do the same thing on French texts to see how the trends (if any) line up chronologically.



Hi, CapnPrep,
Yes, it is based on my corpus data. I will check about French texts if there is a parsed corpus available.


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## berndf

Chigch said:


> Hi, CapnPrep,
> Yes, it is based on my corpus data. I will check about French texts if there is a parsed corpus available.


Just methodological basics: How Did you measure the frequency of such constructs: relative to the number of words on a text or relative to the number of cases where the issue arises, i.e. clauses with compound predicates and prepositional adjucts?


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## Chigch

> The shift in English usage that Chigch is interested would also be a stylistic shift, since I agree with you that English syntax has always allowed complements to be realized to the left of the participle.




Could you please say more about stylistic shift? Your statement seems to be suggesting that stylistic change is independent from syntactic change.


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## Chigch

> Just methodological basics: How Did you measure the frequency of such constructs: relative to the number of words on a text or relative to the number of cases where the issue arises, i.e. clauses with compound predicates and prepositional adjucts?



relative to the number of words on the texts.


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## CapnPrep

Chigch said:


> Your statement seems to be suggesting that stylistic change is independent from syntactic change.


Not necessarily independent. In a syntactic change where an emerging structure competes with an existing structure, the new structure generally starts off as stylistically marked and then becomes more stylistically neutral as it gains ground. The old structure then becomes the marked one, and eventually falls out of use. In the case of the English passive agent construction, it sounds like the pre-verbal order gained ground for a while but it never pushed out the post-verbal order, which I guess has been a stylistically unmarked option for the past several centuries.


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> Not necessarily independent. In a syntactic change where an emerging structure competes with an existing structure, the new structure generally starts off as stylistically marked and then becomes more stylistically neutral as it gains ground. The old structure then becomes the marked one, and eventually falls out of use. In the case of the English passive agent construction, it sounds like the pre-verbal order gained ground for a while but it never pushed out the post-verbal order, which I guess has been a stylistically unmarked option for the past several centuries.


There is a general tendeny in late modern English to place simple attributes in front of the attributed head word and complex attributes after it. E.g. _the sleeping man_ but _the man sleeping in his pyjamas_.

This seems to be a similar case: _... were frequently dismounted_ sounds perfectly idiomatic. On the other hand one would probably say _... were dismounted more frequently than before._


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## Chigch

Hi, CapnPrep,

The English 'PP-passive participle' construction (not only 'by-agent-passive passive' construction), in fact, was never stronger than 'passive participle-PP' in early Modern English, although it was increased in number than before 1500, if there is nothing going wrong with my corpus data. Another fact should be mentioned here: in the same period, there also existed 'PP-active verb' construction, which, however, was decreased than before. What is more interesting is what brought this stylistic shift, what you call the change: was it an English-internal or -external factor.


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## Chigch

> There is a general tendeny in late modern English to place simple attributes in front of the attributed head word and complex attributes after it. E.g. _the sleeping man _but _the mansleeping in his pyjamas._



Hello, berndf, 
What about the tendency of phrases like _the sleeping man _before late Modern English?


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