The most important linguistic developments

Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine

National Technical University of Ukraine ?Kiev Polytechnic Institute?

Faculty of Linguistics

Department of Theory, Practice and Translation of English

?Changes in the Middle English grammar system?

Made by:
Viktoriya Rybalka
Group LE-43
Checked by:
Makeyeva K.S.

KYIV

Content

1. Historical period. Middle English Grammar Before the Norman Conquest??.3

2. The most important linguistic developments??????????????3

3. GRAMMATICAL CHANGES IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD???4

a) The Middle English Noun???????????.?????..4

b) The Middle English Verb?????????????????5

c) The Middle English Adjective???????????????.6

d) The Middle English Pronoun????????????????6

e) The Middle English Adverb?????????????..???7

f) Middle English Sentence Structure??????????...???7

4. The big change from OE to ME???????????????.???..8

5. A multilingual context???????????????????.???8

6. Borrowing from early Scandinavian????????????????10

7. Borrowing from Latin and/or French??????????????.??11

8. A period characterized by variation?????????????????12

Conclusion?????????????????????????.??14

References??????????????????????????..?15

Historical period.

Middle English Grammar Before the Norman Conquest

The chronological boundaries of the Middle English period are not easy to define, and scholarly opinions vary. The dates that OED3 has settled on are 1150-1500. (Before 1150 being the Old English period, and after 1500 being the early modern English period.) In terms of ?external? history, Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the arrival in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the 1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance.

About Middle English Grammar Before the Norman Conquest, people were taught to write a form of Old English that was more archaic than the form they actually spoke. We?re in the same position today. We?re taught to write ?write?, even though we no longer pronounce the w and the e, and our pronunciation of the i is no longer the original pronunciation, which was more like the i in ?machine?.

After the Norman Conquest, when French became the language of the elite, most of the literate class were no longer taught to read and write in English. Although there were some attempts to continue an English literary tradition, it is clear that few writers could reproduce or even completely understand Old English, especially as time wore on. Instead, they tended to represent their own spoken language?early Middle English?often in unsystematic ways. Without schooling in written English, early Middle English writers wrote in their own local dialects, so that the modern reader who becomes familiar with one text must learn another system to read a text from a different part of the country. Although the fourteenth-century London dialect of Geoffrey Chaucer begins to resemble modern English, many of his contemporaries, such as the poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, continued to write in local dialects.

The most important linguistic developments

Two very important linguistic developments characterize Middle English:

? in grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical information. (If we put this in more technical terms, it became less ?synthetic? and more ?analytic?.)Change was gradual, and has different outcomes in different regional varieties of Middle English, but the ultimate effects were huge: the grammar of English c.1500 was radically different from that of Old English.Grammatical gender was lost early in Middle English. The range of inflections, particularly in the noun, was reduced drastically (partly as a result of reduction of vowels in unstressed final syllables), as was the number of distinct paradigms: in most early Middle English texts most nouns have distinctive forms only for singular vs. plural, genitive, and occasional traces of the old dative in forms with final -eoccurring after a preposition.In some other parts of the system some distinctions were more persistent, but by late Middle English the range of endings and their use among London writers shows relatively few differences from the sixteenth-century language of, for example, Shakespeare: probably the most prominent morphological difference from Shakespeare?s language is that verb plurals and infinitives still generally ended in ?en (at least in writing).

? in vocabulary, English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the stylistic register of those words which survived from Old English. Eventually, various new stylistic layers emerged in the lexicon, which could be employed for a variety of different purposes.

One other factor marks out the bulk of our Middle English evidence from the bulk of our Old English or early modern English evidence, although it is less directly a matter of change in the language than in how it is represented in writing:

? the surviving Middle English material is dominated by regional variation, and by (sometimes extreme) variation in how the same underlying linguistic units are represented in writing. This is not because people suddenly started using language in different ways in different places in the Middle English period, but because the fairly standardized late Old English literary variety broke down completely, and writing in English became fragmented, localized, and to a large extent improvised.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 5