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MIDDLE ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY

loss of inflections; loss of grammatical gender ;two noun cases: possessive and non-possessive; all adjective inflections lost, loss of weak/strong distinction; verbs: personal endings reduced, mood distinctions blurred; dual/plural distinction lost;change from synthetic to analytic language due to loss of inflections, reduction of unstressed final vowels, interaction of different inflectional systems in English, French, and Scandinavian; relative rigidity of word order, increasing use of prepositions and particles ;changes more visible in north of England where reduction of inflections began

Nouns -es for genitive singular and all plurals; noun class distinctions disappeared, generalized to the strong masculine declension of OE;weak declension endings (-n) survived into early ME then merged with strong declension (some survivals: children, brethren, oxen); some ME words had plurals with -n: eyen, earen, shoen, handen;some unmarked plurals: some OE strong neuter nouns had no ending in the nominative and accusative plural, continued in ME (year, thing, winter, word); unmarked plurals for animal names (derived from OE unmarked neuter plurals, e.g. deer); measure words without -s in the plural (mile, pound, fathom, pair, score), derived perhaps from s-less plurals of year and winter.

Adjectives-greatest inflectional losses; totally uninflected by end of ME period; loss of case, gender, and number distinctions;distinction strong/weak lost; causes in loss of unstressed endings, rising use of definite and indefinite articles;comparative OE -ra > ME -re, then -er (by metathesis), superlative OE -ost, -est > ME -est; beginnings of periphrastic comparison (French influence): swetter/more swete, more swetter, moste clennest; more and moste as intensifiers.

Personal Pronouns-preservation of gender, number, case, and person categories; merger of dative and accusative into single object case; dual number disappeared; gender became biological instead of grammatical use of 2nd person plural (ye) to address one person as polite form (French influence), eventual loss of singular forms in 18th c.

Verbs-ME retained categories of tense, mood, number, person, strong, weak and other verbs ;added new type of verb, two-part or separable verbal expression, use of adverbial particles instead of prefixes used in Old-English (e.g. put in, blow out, pick up, take over); increased use of weak verbs; beon/wesan collapsed into one form, wesan forms (am, art, is) prevailed in singular present indicative, in plural new form are(n) arose (parallel to Old Norse plural forms (erum erup, eru); to go (eode, eodon) became mixed with past forms of wendan, hence 'went' which replaced 'eode'.

 


Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1118


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FORMATION OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE | MIDDLE ENGLISH SYNTAX
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