Lecture 6 The Evolution of the Nominal System in English

List of questions under discussion

1. The main trends in English grammar in ME and NE

2. The changes in the English noun

3. The changes in the English adjective

4. The development of English pronouns

   1. The changes in the personal pronoun

   2. The rise of the article

1. The main trends in English grammar in me and ne

A fundamental change in the structure of English has taken place since the ME period. In ME and NE many grammatical notions formerly expressed synthetically in OE (grammatical endings, vowel gradation or suppletion) either disappeared from the morphological system of English or came to be expressed by analytical means: analytical forms, which developed from OE syntactical constructions, by word order and special use of prepositions.

The ME period is marked by a great reduction of the inflectional system inherited from OE. There were a number of causes for it.

One is phonological: the weakening and loss of unstressed syllables at the end of words, caused by the fixing of word stress on the first root syllable. This process destroyed many distinctive inflections of OE. As a result of these changes, OE endings -a, -u and -e all became ME -e. The endings -an, -on, -un and -um all became -en, which was later reduced to -e. The endings –as and –es both became ME –es, while –aþ and –eþ both became –eth. Moreover, the final –e, which was all that was left of some endings, itself disappeared during the ME period: in the North, where changes first took place, it was no longer pronounced by the mid-13th century, and in the South it had disappeared by about 1400.

Another cause was the mixing of OE with Old Scandinavian. Frequently, the English and Scandinavian words were sufficiently similar to be recognizable as the roots of many words were the same in both languages, but there were different sets of endings. It has been suggested that in these circumstances, in bilingual situations, speakers would tend to rely on shared vocabulary than on the differing details of the inflectional syntax. It is supposed to contribute to the process of inflectional decay.

One more cause is that Old French also tended to support the inflectional loss in English because it itself preserved only a distinction between singular and plural. What is more, the plural ended in -s, the same ending that was to become universal for the plural in English.

This explanation, however, seems in some ways unsatisfactory, as ME maintained a somewhat more complex inflectional system than NE, so it seems that the influence of Scandinavian and Old French could at best only partially explain the reduction of inflections.

As inflections decayed, so the syntactical information formerly conveyed through inflections was shifted to word order and prepositions. Thus, the English language gradually changed into an analytic one.

2. The changes in the English noun

Since many endings became identical, the noun system was greatly simplified in ME and NE.

1) The changes in the noun inflections and the operation of analogy led to the re-arrangement of the types of declensions. Their number was reduced. The two most numerous types of declension which had the most distinctive of the remaining flexions tended to attract all the other nouns to themselves. One was the a-stem, which had its nominative plural in –as (stānas) and its genitive singular in –es (stānes) in OE. Both these endings became ME –es, so that the nominative plural and genitive singular coincided (stones).

The other declension was the n-stem, with the OE ending –an for the nominative plural and genitive singular (e.g. ēahan ‘eyes’ and ‘of an eye’); in ME they became -en (eyen).

Of these two declensions, the first became dominant in the northern dialects, in which almost all nouns tended to form the nominative plural and genitive singular with –es, and forms like eyes are normal by about 1200. In the South, on the other hand, it was the –en declension that became dominant by the middle of the period, and many nouns that in OE belonged to other declensions came to use the –en plural (though –es was common for the genitive singular). For example, englen, devlen, though OE had dēoflas, enhlas. But in the course of the ME period the –es plural spread southwards and displaced –en, and by the 15^th c. it was almost universal, the English modern plural ending is directly descended from it.

There are a few relics of other OE declensions in NE.

They are:

– the former root-stems, where the vowel of the plural was changed by front mutation, and there is no ending (men, geese, etc.);

– nouns going back to the original a-stem declension of neuter gender, which had no ending in the Nom. and Acc. pl even in OE (scēap ‘sheep’ – scēap ‘sheep’, dēor ‘wild animal’ – dēor ‘wild animals’);

– a noun of the n-stem declension, preserving its plural form (ox – oxen < OE ocsa – ocsan);

– the original s-stem declension word, which had the ending -ru in the plural forms. In ME it was influenced by the en-declension (child – children < OE cild – cildru).

2) The simplification of the noun inflectional system affected the grammatical categories of the noun in ME and NE.

In the 11^th and 12^th cc. the grammatical gender disappeared together with other distinctive features of the noun declension, because the weakening of unstressed syllables levelled all the endings, which were the only markers of the gender.

3) In ME the number of cases was reduced as compared to OE.

OE Early ME Late ME and NE

Nom.

→ Common

Acc.

→ Common

Dat. → Dative

G en. → Genitive → Genitive

In Early ME all four of the OE noun-cases are still preserved, but in the course of the period there is a tendency to reduce the number of forms first to 3 (due to the homonymy of the endings in Nom and Acc, which frequently occurred even in OE), and finally to 2 (with the loss of the -e ending in Dat. due to its reduction).

Thus, the complicated noun paradigm that existed in OE was greatly simplified in ME and NE, which is reflected in the following:

1) the reduction in the number of declensions and the decay of the declension system;

2) the reduction in the number of the grammatical categories (gender);

3) the reduction in the number of categorical forms (within the category of case).