Development of Future and Passive in English

In the OE language there was no form of the Future tense. The category of Tense consisted of two members: Past and Present. The Present Tense could indicate both present and future actions, depending on the context.

There was another way of presenting future actions — modal phrases consisting of verbs «sculan, willan, magan, cunnan» (NE shall, will, may, can) and the Infinitive of the notional verb.

In these phrases the meaning of the futurity was combined with strong modal meanings of volition, obligation and possibility.

In ME the use of modal phrases, especially with the verb «shall» became increasingly common. «shall» plus Infinitive was not the principal means of indicating future actions in any context. «Shall» could retain its modal meaning of necessity, but often weakened it to such an extent that the phrase denoted «pure» futurity.

In late ME texts «shall» was used both as a modal verb and as a Future Tense auxiliary. Future actions were also commonly expressed by ME «willen» with an Infinitive, but the meaning of volition in «will» must have been more obvious than the modal meaning of «shall».In the times of Shakespeare the phrases with «shall» and «will» occured in free variation. They can express «pure» futurity and add different shades of modal meanings. In OE there were 12 modals, In ME — 2 most frequently used modals «shall» and «will».

Passive. In OE the finite verb had no category of voice.

The analytical passive forms developed from OE verb phrases consisting of OE bēon (NE be) and weorðan (become) and Part.II of transitive verbs.

OE bēon was used as a link-verb with a predicative expressed by Part.II to denote a state resulting from a preveous action, while the construction with OE weorðan “become” indicated the transition into the state expressed by the Part. The Part. in OE agreed with the subject in number and gender.

In ME ben + Past Part. developed into an analytical form. Now it could express not only a state but also an action.

The new passive forms had a regular means of indicating the doer of the action or the instrument with the help of which it was performed.

Late ME saw the appearance of new types of passive constructions. Passive forms began to be built from intransitive verbs associated with different kinds of objects. The passive voice continued to spread to new parts the verb paradigm: the gerund and the continuous forms.

Nominal Grammatical categories and their historical development

There are only two grammatical categories in the declension of nouns against three in Old English: number and case, the category of gender having been lost at the beginning of the Middle English period.

Number

There are two number forms in Middle English: Singular and Plural. For example:

Singular

Plural

Old English Middle English

fisc fish

stan stpn

nama name

fiscas fishes

stanas stpnes

naman names

Case

The number of cases in Middle English is reduced to compared to Old English. There are only two cases of case in English: Common and Genetive, the Old English Nominal, Accusative and Dative case having fused into one case Common case at the beginning of Middle English.

For example:

Old English Middle English

Nominative stan nama 1

Accusative stan naman \ —≫ Common case stpn na

Dative stane naman J

Genitive stanes naman => Genitive case stones nam

we see that the complicated noun paradigm that existe in Old English was greatly simplified in Middle English, which reflected in the following:

1) reduction of the number of declensions;

2) reduction of the number of grammatical categories;

3) reduction of the number of categorial forms within one of the two remaining grammatical categories — the category of case.

The category of gender is formal, traditional already in Old English; in Middle English and New English nouns have no category оf gender.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 2269