16

Module 9

The grammatical system in middle english and early new english

The nominal system

Outline

1. Main trends of development. Analytical forms

2. Changes in the nominal system in Middle English

2.1. The noun

2.1.1. Formation of the plural from the historical point of view

2.2. The adjective

2.3. The pronoun

2.4. The article

3. Conclusions

1. Main trends of development. Analytical forms

Between the 10th and the 16th c., i.e. from Late OE to Early NE the ways of building up grammatical forms underwent considerable changes. In OE all the forms which can be included into morphological paradigms were synthetic. In ME and Early NE, grammatical forms could also be built in the analytical way, e.g. with the help of auxiliary words. The proportion of synthetic forms in the language had become very small, for many of the old synthetic forms had been lost and no new synthetic forms had developed. In the remaining synthetic forms of the ME and Early NE periods the means of form-building were the same as before: inflections, sound interchanges and suppletion; only prefixation, namely the prefix e-, which was commonly used in OE to mark participle II, went out of use in Late ME.

Since ME is the period of the levelling of endings (H. Sweet), many earlier distinctions disappear. The reduction of declension, which had begun in OE (cf. the homonymous endings of nouns belonging to different types of declension in some cases), developed more intensively in the 11^th – 13^th centuries. In OE there existed a variety of distinct endings differing in consonants as well as in vowels. In ME all the vowels in the endings were reduced to the neutral [ə] and many consonants were levelled under -n or dropped. The process of levelling, besides phonetic weakening, implies replacement of inflections by analogy, e.g. -(e)s as a marker of plural forms of nouns displaced the endings -(e)n and -e. In the transition to NE most of the grammatical endings were dropped.

Reduction of the morphological system developed more quickly in the Northern dialect, which was followed by the Midland.

The analytical way of form-building was a new device, which developed in Late OE and ME and came to occupy a most important place in the grammatical system. Analytical forms developed from free word groups (phrases, syntactical constructions). The first component of these phrases gradually weakened or even lost its lexical meaning and turned into a grammatical marker, while the second component retained its lexical meaning and acquired a new grammatical value in the compound form.

Analytical form-building was not equally productive in all the parts of speech: it transformed the morphology of the verb but did not affect the noun.

2. Changes in the nominal system in Middle English

The main direction of development for the nominal parts of speech in the ME period can be defined as morphological simplification.

Within the period between c. 1000 and 1300 called an “Age of Great Changes” (A.Baugh), the nominal morphological system underwent significant transformations. Some nominal categories were lost – gender and case in adjectives, gender in nouns; the number of forms distinguished in the surviving categories was reduced – cases in nouns and noun-pronouns, numbers in personal pronouns. Morphological division into types of declension practically disappeared. In Late ME the adjective lost the distinction of number and the distinction of weak and strong forms.

At the time of Chaucer the English nominal system was very much like modern.