Personal and Possessive Pronouns

In Early ME the OE Fern, pronoun of the 3rd p. sg heo (re­lated to all the other pronouns of the 3rd p. — he, hit, hie) was re­placed by a group of variants — he, ho, see, sho, she: one of them — she — finally prevailed over the others. The new Fem. pronoun, Late ME she, is believed to have developed from the OE demonstrative pronoun of the Fem. gender — seo (OE se, seo, pset, NE that). It was first recorded in the North Eastern regions and gradually extended to other areas.

The OE pronoun of the 3rd p. pl hie was replaced by the Scand. loan-word they. Like the pronoun she, it came from the North-Eastern areas and was adopted by the mixed London dialect. This time the replacement was more complete: they ousted the Nom. case, OE hie, while them and their (coming from the same Scand. loan) replaced the oblique case forms: OE hem and heora. The two sets of forms — coming from they and hie — occur side by side in Late ME texts.

Both in ME and in Early NE the pronouns were subjected to extensive grammatical changes. The category of

Number was brought into conformity with the corresponding categories of nouns and verbs; the forms of the dual number of the 1st and 2nd p. went into disuse in Early ME.

The category of Caseunderwent profound alterations. The forms of the Dat. and the Acc. cases began to merge in OE, especially in the West Saxon dialect. The syncretism of the Dat. and Acc. took a long time: it began in Early OE in the 1st and 2nd p. pi; in Late OE it extended to the 1st and 2nd p. sg; in Early ME it spread to the 3rd p.; it was completed in Late ME.

Two cases fell togeth­er — Dat. and Acc. — into what may be called the Obj. case but its dis­tinction from the Nom. case was preserved. In Late ME the paradigm of personal pronouns consisted of two cases: Nom. and Obj.

In Early NE the syncretism of cases entered a new phase: the Nom. case began to merge with the Obj. case. Yet the tendency to reduce the case system of personal pronouns was not fully realised. Only two personal pronouns, you and it lost all case distinctions in NE.

The pronoun it goes back to the ME Nom. case it, OE hit; the ME Obj. case of it, him (OE Dat.) was identical with the form of the Masc. pronoun he, him; it was used in the function of object in ME as a variant of him, as a substitute of inanimate nouns; eventually it displaced him. This replacement reflects the new grouping of nouns into animate and inanimate, which had superseded the division into genders: it, which stood for inanimate things, had to be kept distinct from he, him in both forms — Nom. and Obj.

The OE Gen. case of personal pronouns split from the other forms and turned into a new class of pronouns — possessive.

In OE the Gen. case of personal pronouns — like the Gen. case of nouns — was commonly used in the attributive function; its use as an object was rare. Some of these forms were treated like other noun mod­ifiers: they agreed with the head-noun in case and number, while others did not. In ME these pronouns became more homogeneous: they had all lost their forms of agreement and were uninfected. They can be regarded as a separate class of pronouns termed "possessive".

The OE oblique case-forms of personal pronouns and the ME possessive pronouns gave rise to one more type of pronouns — reflex­ive. Reflexive pronouns developed from combinations of some forms of personal pronouns with the adjective self. Their origins are obvious from their modern structures: e. g. myself, ourselves consist of the Gen. case (or possessive pronoun) and the component self; himself, themselves contain theObj. case of personal pronouns as their first components. (In ME and Early NE reflexive pronouns were not as yet fixed in the schemes familiar today; instances like He clothed him hastily were not infrequent.)

Demonstrative pronouns were adjective-pronouns; like other adjectives, in OE they agreed with the noun in case, number and gender and had a well-developed morphological paradigm.

In Early ME the OE demonstrative pronouns se, seo, p&t and pes, peos, pis — lost most of their inflected forms: out of seventeen forms each retained only two. The ME descendants of these pronouns are that and this, the former Norn, and Acc. cases, Neut. sg, which served now as the sg of all cases and genders. Each pronoun had a respective pi form, which made up a balanced paradigm of forms opposed through number.

Sg this PI thise/thes(e) (NE this —these)

that thofthos(e) (NE that —those)

(Number distinctions in demonstrative pronouns have survived as an archaic trait in the modern grammatical system, for no other noun mod­ifier agrees now with the noun in number.)

The other classes of OE pronouns — interrogative and in­definite — were subjected to the same simplifying changes as all nomi­nal parts of speech. The paradigm of the OE interrogative pronoun hwa was reduced to two forms — who, the Nom. case, and whom, the Obj. case.

The Gen. case of OE hwd, hw&t — hw&s — developed into a sepa­rate interrogative pronoun, similarly with the Gen. case of personal pronouns — ME and NE whose. OE hwi, the former Instr. case of the same pronouns continued to be used as a separate pronoun why; OE hwelc, ME which, formerly used only with relation to person widened its appli­cation and began to be used with relation to things. ME whether (from OE hwseper) was used as an interrogative pronoun in the meaning 'which of the two' but later was mainly preserved as a conjunction.

Most indefinite pronouns of the OE period simplified their morphological structure and some pronouns fell out of use. For instance, man died out as an indefinite pronoun. Eventually new types of compound indefinite pronouns came into use — with the component - thing, -body, -one, etc; in NE they developed a two-case paradigm like nouns: the Comm. and the Poss. or Gen. case: anybody — anybody's.

OE demonstrative and interrogative pronouns became the source of a new type of pronouns — relative. Their growth is described and exemplified in the paragraphs dealing with the development of the complex sentence.

The lexical and grammatical changes in the personal and pos­sessive pronouns are shown in Table 2:

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1762