ENGLISH LANGUAGE – 2° YEAR A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Annalisa Federici, Ph.D. Textbook: J. Culpeper, History of English, Routledge (unit 8)

GRAMMAR: NOUNS Over the centuries, English has undergone dramatic changes in the way it signals grammatical information (number, case). One of the main differences between OE and present-day English is that in the former grammatical information was typically signalled by INFLECTIONS or endings of words. Today there is one main inflection for nouns: the final -s or -es to signal number. The legacy of the past is also apparent in irregular plurals (e.g. mice, sheep) and in the possessive case ‘s. Imported words have generally followed the rules of the language they come from (cf Latin plurals datum / data, criterion / criteria, index / indices, focus / foci, formula / formulae) but have also maintained “native” plural forms (criterions, indexes, focuses, formulas), though they are far less common.

GRAMMAR: NOUNS INFLEXIONS for six OE nouns: hund (dog), deor (animal), cild (child), oxa (ox), fot (foot), lufu (love). All the different inflexions of a noun make up the DECLENSION of that noun.

GRAMMAR: NOUNS In OE words had INFLECTIONS or endings which indicated the function or relationship of words to other words in the sentence, regardless of word order. Such CASE ENDINGS varied according to GENDER (masculine, feminine, neuter), NUMBER (singular vs. plural, dual) and CASE (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative). Each case signalled a specific grammatical function:  Nominative: the subject of a sentence (Love conquers all)  Accusative: the direct object of a sentence (God save the Queen)  Genitive: the possessor or source (Dr. Johnson’s dictionary)  Dative: the indirect object or recipient (I gave the librarian a book)

GRAMMAR: NOUNS In present-day English nouns have no inflectional endings and their function within the sentence is mainly signalled by word order (cf Australia beat England vs. England beat Australia). With the loss of inflectional endings, English has gradually become a SVO language, whereas in OE word order was much more flexible. The inflectional ending of the genitive case gave rise to the ‘s of the possessive case (e.g. the king’s men), or to the use of prepositions (e.g. the inhabitants of this land), which was not so common in OE.

GRAMMAR: NOUNS Second-person pronouns used to be more marked for case and number than they are now. The Early Modern period was one of transition with a mixture of you and thou forms, due to social factors: the former was a prestige form associated with the upper classes, as contrasted with the latter. Nowadays, the form you has become predominant.

GRAMMAR: NOUNS LEGACY OF NOUN INFLECTIONS IN ME: 1.In OE there were different categories of nouns with different plural endings for each case. Over time, the - s plural marker has become predominant and is the one mainly used today. Other forms, such as zero marking for plural, still survive in the pairs fish/fish, sheep/sheep, etc. 2.In OE the plural of cild (“child”) was cildru, then childer. The -en of children was not present in OE, but became popular in Early Modern English (as in eyen, shoen, housen, treen). Nowadays, the only pure survivor of this declension is the pair ox/oxen.

GRAMMAR: NOUNS 3.In OE some words such as fot (“foot”) not only had inflections, but also changed the vowel of their basic form. However, such change was also found in the dative singular, and not all plural forms had it. Vowel change only later became a mark of plural, surviving today in the irregular plurals foot/feet, tooth/teeth, man/men, etc. 4.In OE the most common genitive singular marker was the -es inflection, which was later extended to other nouns. By ME, both the genitive singular and the nominative/accusative plural endings were written -es and thus merged (e.g. OE gen. sing. hundes and OE plur. hundas both became houndes).

GRAMMAR: NOUNS 5.During the ME period, virtually all nouns were reduced to two forms: one without -es to indicate a singular, and one with -es to indicate either a genitive singular or a plural. However, the use of ‘s to identify a genitive singular or ‘ for genitive plural was not adopted until the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries.

GRAMMAR: NOUNS Most other inflections died out: English has changed from being a SYNTHETIC INFLECTIONAL LANGUAGE (like Latin) to being an ANALYTIC ISOLATING LANGUAGE (like Chinese), relying much more on the word order SVO to signal grammatical information (N.B.: a synthetic language indicates the relations of words in a sentence by means of inflections; an analytic language makes use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and depends on word order to show the relations of words in a sentence).

GRAMMAR: NOUNS Signs of syntactic change in the ME period: Gradual loss of inflectional endings for gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), number (singular, plural, dual), case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) in nouns, adjectives, pronouns. Increase of definite (the, often spelled þe, not marked for gender or case) and indefinite (a or an, not following the Modern English rule still) articles. Use of prepositions to replace inflectional endings for genitive and dative case. Introduction of analytic comparatives and superlatives (more and most). Regular use of subject pronouns (not yet obligatory in Early ME). Stricter word order.