Syntactic Changes in English between the Seventeenth Century and the Twentieth Century as Represented in Two Literary Works: William Shakespeare's Play The Merchant of Venice and George Bernard Shaw's Play Arms and the Man

العبويني, يمان محمود عايش (2018) Syntactic Changes in English between the Seventeenth Century and the Twentieth Century as Represented in Two Literary Works: William Shakespeare's Play The Merchant of Venice and George Bernard Shaw's Play Arms and the Man. Masters thesis, جامعة الشرق الاوسط.

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Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to identify the syntactic changes in the English language between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. This has been done through analyzing two literary works that belong to two different periods. The first one is The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare that represents the Early Modern English period (17th century) and the second is Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw which represents the Mid-Late Modern English period (20th century). This study adopted the content analysis approach to investigate the syntactic changes in the English language from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century. The researcher has selected dialogs in a systematic random order for the purpose of analysis in this study. The findings show that there are changes in some syntactic structures, i.e. word order. Some structures used in The Merchant of Venice either changed in Arms and the Man or are not used in the selected sample of dialogs. Also, there are some changes which are found in Early Modern English, but do not occur in the literary work. Key Words: English Syntactic changes, Syntactic structure, 17th and 20th Centuries

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