The development of personal pronouns in the history of English.

Personal Pronouns possessed (and still do) a very vivid Indo-European feature – suppletivity (i.e. they build their forms with the help of different roots (see also Lecture 4)).

Personal pronouns in OE changed in Gender, Number, Case, Person:

Pers.	Case	Number
Singular	Plural	Dual
1st	Nom	ic	wē	wit
Gen	min	ūre	uncer
Dat	mē	ūs	unc
Acc	mec/mē	ūsic	uncit
2nd	Nom	þu*	ζē*	ζit
Gen	þin	ēower	incer
Dat	þe	ēow*	inc
Acc	þec/þe	ēowic	incit
Pers.	Case	Gender, Number
M, Sg	F, Sg	N, Sg	Plural
3rd	Nom	hē*	hēo/hīo*	hit*	hēo/hīe*
Gen	his	hire	his	hira
Dat	him	hire	him	him
Acc	hine	hīe	hit	hēo/hīe

Later the following changes happened to the personal pronouns (some of them are marked with * in the table above so that one can trace the connection easily):

1. Gender is still preserved (he, she, it) in ModE but is often denied by scholars because it is expressed lexically and practically has nothing to do with grammar.

2. Cases: -In ME the Genitive Case turned into a new class of pronouns – Possessive Pronouns (e.g. ModE I (pers.) – mine (possess.); you – yours, he – his, she – her, etc.); -The Dative and the Accusative Cases fell together and formed the Objective Case. Thus in ME there were only two cases left in the personal pronouns – Nominative and Objective (e.g. ModE I (Nom) – me (Obj); he – him, she – her, etc.).

3. Number.Dual forms disappeared in ME. In NE the category of Number disappeared in the 2^nd person of the personal pronouns (see the explanation below).

4. 3^rd person.As far as in the Early ME many forms in the 3^rd person coincided phonetically and often caused confusion and difficulties in communication, the following changes occurred:

Pers.	Gender	OE	Early ME	Late ME	Comments
3rd	M, Sg	hē à	he à	he	preserved original form
F, Sg	hēo/hīo à	he à	she	As far as it coincided with M, Sg and Plural forms, a new word was found – derived from the demonstrative pronoun sēo (F, Sg, Nom) – to distinguish the forms.
N, Sg	hit à	hit à	it	preserved original form, lost initial [h]
Plural	hēo/hīe à	he/hi à	they	As far as it coincided with M, Sg and F, Sg forms, a new word was found – a Scandinavian borrowing – to distinguish the forms.

Pers.	Number	OE	ME	Comments	NE
2nd	Sg	þu à	thouà	Fell out of use due to the French etiquette (it forbade impolite “thou” form, so it was replaced with the polite “ēow” form).	ēow (Pl, Dat)(you)
Pl	ζē à	ye à	Coincided phonetically with wē à was dropped

T hus in NE the category of Number disappeared in the 2^nd person of the personal pronouns.

The Development of the Adjective

Adjectives

Number –Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl).

Gender –Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N).

Case –Nominative (Nom), Genitive (Gen), Dative (Dat), Accusative (Acc) + Instrumental(Instr).

Instrumental Case was used to express instrumental meaning but only in the adjective while the noun stood in Dative Case:

by/with + Adjective (Instr) + Noun (Dat)

Degrees of Comparison –positive, comparative, superlative.

Determination (Definiteness/Indefiniteness) –today this category has to do with the Article but in OE there were no articles and definiteness/indefiniteness was expressed with the help of inflections of the Adjective, i.e. the inflections of the Adjective helped to determine whether a noun was definite or indefinite.

Historically the Adjective is a younger class of words as compared to the Noun. So it has borrowed many of its categories and inflections from the Noun and the Pronoun.

The Adjective had the following categories:

Gender

It still existed in OE but was the first category to disappear in the 11^th c.

Case

· At the end of OE Period Instrumental Case fell together with Dative Case due to the homonymy of inflections;

· All other cases disappeared by the end of the 13^th c. also due to the homonymy of inflections.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1297

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