The book examines the word order of two Old Germanic languages Old English and Old High German
using a corpus containing samples of three text types: poetry original prose and translated
prose. Thanks to this methodology it is possible to compare word order patterns in Old English
and Old High German eliminating differences which may be due to stylistic or technical reasons
(rhythm rhyme Latin influences) as well as to see to what extent text type determines word
order and to check whether this phenomenon is universal (triggering similar behaviour in both
analysed languages). The book also disproves the hypothesis of the West Germanic syntax
presenting data which show that the word order of the two languages started to diversify
already during the Old English High German period i. e. before the 11th century AD.
