Changes in Middle English Grammar

The MidE period is often called ‘the period of leveling of endings’. The phonetic tendency to reduce an unstressed vowel ensued in dropping grammatical endings. With its simplified case-ending system, Middle English is closer to modern English than its pre-Conquest equivalent.

1. Loss of most case-related inflections. This happened first with nouns, which were leveled to generic forms: dog, dogs, dog's; then it happened to adjectives as well.

The strong -s plural form has survived into Modern English, while the weak -n form is rare (oxen, children, brethren).

2) Loss of grammatical gender and appearance of "natural" gender. ie: "table" was no longer a "male" noun and "house" no longer a female noun, but words like "mare" and "stallion" would have pronoun references based on gender.

3) As inflections disappeared, English changed from a synthetic to an analytic language, which lead to the development of a fixed word order.

4) Words began to take on new meanings; in particular, nouns began to find themselves being used as verbs for the first time: mouth, fish (conversion)

5) The first person singular of present tense verbs ends in -e (ic here), the second person in -(e)st (þou spekest), and the third person in -eþ (he comeþ).

6) In the past tense, weak verbs are formed by an -ed(e), -d(e) or -t(e) ending, so they became more orderly and simple.

7) Strong verbs form their past tense by changing their stem vowel.

8) In some verbs Preterite singular form of the verb started to be used for both Preterite singular and plural.

Compare:

9) Many OE strong verbs became weak, for example:

OE helpan (Class III) – healp – hulpon – holpen;

MidE helpen – helped – helped.

A few new strong verbs appeared and there were some weak verbs that became strong.

10) -ende particilple disappeared in MidE, the new Particilple ended in –ing.

The future forms became quite usual, as modal verbs shal and will lost their original meaning.

11) Use of the double and triple negative became common:

"ne isaeh naevere na man selere chiht nenne"

("no-one had ever seen a better knight").

12) Middle English personal pronouns:

The third person plural personal pronoun is replaced by the Scandinavian they.

Though the MIdE noun lost most of its endings, it acquired the new morphological determiner – the article. People started t use the demonstrative pronoun sē as an article in late OE period; in MidE it got the form the, the initial sound [s] was replaced by [½] by analogy.

The indefinite article originated from the numeral ān (one).

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 3396