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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 2nd person of the personal pronouns (see the explanation below).
4. 3rd person.As far as in the Early ME many forms in the 3rd 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 2nd 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 11th 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 13th c. also due to the homonymy of inflections.
Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1502
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