история языка / ME Morphology

Middle English Morphology

1. The Noun in ME

2. The Adjective in ME

3. The rise of the Definite Article

4. The ME Verbal System

5. ME Syntax

The ME period is marked by a great reduction in the inflectional system inherited from OE, so that ME is often referred to as the period of weakened inflections.

Causes for these changes:

1. the mixing of OE with Old Norse. Frequently, the English and Scandinavian words were sufficiently similar to be recognizable, but had different sets of inflections (e.g. OE sunu – OScan. sunr);

2. phonological cause: the loss and weakening of unstressed syllables at the ends of words destroyed many of the distinctive inflections of OE:

OE endings –an, -on, -un, -um all became –en, which was later reduced to –e.

OE endings –as and –es both became –es.

The phonological changes first took place in the North.

1. The Noun

These changes had disastrous effects on the inflectional system of the nouns, since many endings became identical.

As a result, the whole inflectional system became simplified.

The number of declensions was reduced to two:

1. ME Strong declension: Nom. Pl –es; Gen. Sg. –es (OE strong a-stem declension);

2. ME Weak declension: Nom. Pl. –en; Gen. Sg. –en (OE weak n-stem declension).

Of these two declensions, the first became dominant in the northern dialects, in which all the nouns tended to form the Nom. Pl. and the Gen. Sg. with –es.

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. So we find forms like devlen ‘devils’ (OE deoflas) and englen ‘angels’ (OE englas).

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, our modern plural ending is directly descended from it. (but: PDE oxen, children, brethren [собратья; братия]).

We still have a few relics of other declensions: there are the mutated plurals like feet, geese, mice, and men, where the vowel of the plural was changed by front mutation, and there is no plural ending.

In Early ME we find all four noun-cases still preserved in both singular and plural, but in the course of the period there is a tendency to reduce the total number of forms to three:

Nom Sg. eye

Gen Sg. eyes

Plural eyen

In the North, the plural and Gen Sg. were identical, and there were only two forms:

Nom Sg. eye

Gen Sg. and Plural eyes.

The number of cases was reduced to two: Common and Genitive.

The grammatical categories:

1. the category of case (Common and Genitive);

2. the category of number (Singular and Plural);

3. the category of gender (masculine, feminine and neuter)

The historical shift in English has been from 'grammatical' to 'natural' gender. Middle English saw a shift towards a system in which sex became the primary or sole determinant; objects that are male or female in the real world tend to attract masculine or feminine pronouns; all other objects (concrete or abstract) are sexless or neuter (in the etymological sense of'neither one nor the other'). Like many major structural simplifications in English, gender loss began in the north.

4. types of declension: strong and weak.

II. The adjectives

In adjectives there were only two forms:

1. the base-form (e.g. fair);

2. a form with the ending –e (e.g. faire) which was used both for the plural and as the weak form. This stage was reached in Chaucer, who writes ‘the weder is fair’, but ‘faire wives’ (=plural form) and ‘this faire Pertelote’ (=the weak form after the demonstrative this).

As a result, in early ME there existed two declensions:

• strong declension with zero ending for Singular and ending –e for Plural;

• weak declension with ending –e for both Singular and Plural forms.

When the final –e was lost towards the end of the ME period, these two forms became the same, and the adjective became indeclinable, as it is today.

III. The definite article

In OE the definite article showed three genders (sē masculine, sēo feminine, þæt neuter), and was declined through all four cases, singular and plural.

The form the arose as Late OE þe, which supplanted sē and sēo. By the end of the ME period we have reached the modern position, in which the is the only form of the definite article.

IV. The ME Verbal System

Old English marked two tenses (past vs present), three moods (indicative vs imperative vs subjunctive), and three persons (first, second, third) and two numbers; 4 morphological classes

OE strong and weak verbs are largelly Indo-European in type.

Strong verbs are verbs that signal change in tense through the change in the root vowel of the word. Examples of strong verbs are drink, drank, drunk; run, ran; and think, thought.

The conceptual basis of the weak conjugation is marking of the past by a suffix containing a 'dental' element, usually / t / or / d / : OE weak dem-an' judge', past 1 sg. dem-d-e, past pple -dem-e-d.

In ME the suffix principle remains characteristic and defines the class.

Losses among the Strong Verbs.

Nearly a third of the strong verbs in OE seem to have died out early in the Middle English period.

At a time when English was the language chiefly of the lower classes and largely removed from the restraining influences of education and a literary standard, it was natural that many speakers should apply the pattern of weak verbs to some which were historically strong.

The weak conjugation offered a fairly consistent pattern for the past tense and the past participle, whereas there was much variety in the different classes of the strong verb. We say sing—sang—sung, but drive—drove—driven, fall—fell—fallen, etc.

The principle of analogy—the tendency of language to follow certain patterns and adapt a less common form to a more familiar one—is well exemplified in the further history of the strong verbs.

The two key changes which affected a verb when passing from Old English to Middle English were:

1) the reduction of inflectional endings, and

2) the shift of strong verbs to the weak paradigm.

The OE verb had many inflections, basically 2 tenses.

In ME the system of inflections became much reduced, but a complicated system of tenses is built up by means of the primary auxilaries (be, have, do) and the modal auxiliaries (shall, should, will, etc.).

The Future Tense

The future tense with shall and will is established in ME. In OE these verbs had the connotation of obligation and desire respectively.

OE ic sceal meant “I am obliged to”

OE ic wille meant “I wish to”.

ME Chaucer’s poem:

I shal myself to herbes techen yow

That shul been for youre heele and for youre prow.

PDE I shall myself direct you to herbs that will be for your health and for your benefit.

The Perfect Tenses and Passive Forms

The Perfect tenses with habban or bēon and the passive forms with bēon and weorþan already existed in OE, but they came to be used more frequently in ME.

In the perfect, have spread at the expense of be, but be was common with verbs of motion and change of state, and this continued to be the case even in Early Modern English.

In the passive, be supplanted weorþan, which had fallen out of use by the end of ME.

The Continuous Tenses

The Continuous tenses, formed with be and the present participle also arise in ME, but are not at all common until the Modern English period.

OE construction: be + the present participle.

But the continuous tenses arose from ME sentences like he was areading, where areading has developed from on reading (descended from OE noun ræding ‘the act of reading’), and the sentence means ‘he was engaged in the act of reading’. Later areading lost its first syllable, and we arrived at the modern sentence he was reading.

By the end of ME the perfect, passive, and continuous markings of the verb were all well established, though much less frequently used than today.

V. ME Syntax

As the inflectional system decayed, other devices were increasingly used to replace it.

1. Word-order became more important: S-V-O word-order became the dominant one. The use V-S-O order, especially after certain adverbs, persisted throughout the period till the 17^th c.

2. The use of prepositions to perform the functions formely carried out by word-endings. E.g. prepositions like in, with, by.