A DESCRIPTIVE SYNCHRONIC COMPARATIVE STUDY OF OLD ENGLISH AND MODERN GERMAN CASE AND WORD ORDER IN ACTIVE SENTENCE: A BASIC PATTERN OF........

A DESCRIPTIVE SYNCHRONIC COMPARATIVE STUDY
OF OLD ENGLISH AND MODERN GERMAN
CASE AND WORD ORDER IN ACTIVE SENTENCE:
A BASIC PATTERN OF KERNEL SENTENCE AND
TAGMEMIC APPROACH

By

Muhammad Febrianoer
03326138

ABSTRACT

Although Old English is no longer a spoken language, its uniqueness remains to attract scholars to conduct a research on it. It can be seen that there have been a lot of studies of Old English as if it were still alive. The studies are not to understand it so that people can learn and use it for verbal and written communication in daily life but it is more as a medium to understand ancient texts and to compare to another language in a comparative study. In many ways it resembles Modern German. Then grammarians group them into the same language family i.e. Indo European. This thesis focuses on the case and word order of Old English and Modern German to discover the relationship between them in active sentence to get the similarities and the behavior of the similarities.

For that purpose, data are collected by getting samples of sentences from both printed and non printed sources of Old English and Modern German. The sentence category is based on its structure which covers simple, compound and complex sentence; and on its function which covers affirmative, interrogative and imperative sentence. The characteristics of the research are descriptive synchronic comparative. It means that it describes the Old English and Modern German case and word order, then compares them based on synchronic point of view. The analysis itself is done by using the Basic Pattern of Kernel Sentence and Tagmemic Approach. These approaches are suitable because they determine the relation of words with other parts in the same construction just as the characteristics of Old English and Modern German which belong to synthetic language of which sentence construction is word-form based.

Then it can be concluded that Old English has five cases. They are nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and instrumental. Modern German has only four cases. They are nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. Actually Old English and Modern German are not completely free of word order like some grammarians state. They are just fairly free with some applied terms and conditions. Case is not the only one that influences Old English and Modern German word order. There are some other factors influencing the word order. They are punctuation, prosody, emphasis and the non-permeability phrase, main clause and subordinate clause.