Morphological Change OE to ME Flashcards
NOMINAL MORPHOLOGY: Phonological Mergers and Analogical levelling lead to ?
A largely uninflected nominal system. Genitive is somewhat remained, and singular plural distinction remains. Also some weak plurals remain e.g oxen and some plurals shift the other way gaining a weak plural. Some neuter plurals (previously -ru, then -re) gain an extra -n plural marker by analogy with weak nouns in Southern dialects giving -re-n: children! However in Northern Middle English was Childer. Umlaut plurals remain, presumably due to frequency (Gorlach). These changes are finished by 1300.
Do adjectives lose inflection?
Yes all of it
What adjectival system is introduced in 18th century
comparative and superlative (more & most) system
How do articles develop?
Initial thorn spreads to masc and fem nom sing forms.
masc.-fem. nominative singular þe increasingly adopted as invariant form for all cases/numbers/genders.
This seems to precede the loss of gender and case as morphological categories. (Opposite to in German where more case and gender marking is retained on article than on nouns).
TWO KEY PROPOSED EXPLANATIONS FOR THESE MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGES
Sound changes made the morphological system unlearnable, so speakers salvaged and regularised learnable bits to make a simpler system.
Contact with Brythonic, Old Norse or Old French disrupted the learning of irregular and dysfunctional morphology, with the result that simplified systems arose in high contact dialects and spread out to others.
How do pronouns change
Loss of dual ich>i merger of dative & accusative hine&him>him third person plurals borrowed from ON development of she new possessive forms hers, ours, yours (north to south no explanation) my/mine grammatical distinction its develops reflexives self and selfen develop reorganisation of second person pronouns
explain the loss of the dual
this is the end of a long process. In sanskrit (an earlier descendant of PIE) there was dual agreement on nouns & verbs as well
how did ich>i change?
unsure perhaps competing variation, ease of articulation? It spread from north to south.
how did hine&him merge
analogical extension from 1st & second person spread from East to West.
explain introduction of ON 3rd person pronouns
spreading from north DANELAW midlands says gorlach to south and happening first in the nominative, then genitive, finally dative/accusative. HOWEVER Marcelle Cole 2018 writes that there is in fact a native root for these pronouns and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.
explain the development of ‘she’
she develops, either from hēo > heoː > hjoː > çoː > ʃoː or from demonstrative sēo > seoː > sjoː > ʃoː, followed by change of the vowel to eː by analogy with hē (scho is actually attested, so the last stage (scho > she by analogy with he) we’re pretty confident about, but the creation of scho is more guesswork).
my/mine explanation
initially my/mine variation was due to a following consonant/vowel but there is extensive variation
reanalysis by L2?
possessive its explanation
possessive of it remains his in Middle English, but its emerges at the end of the 16th century (first attested 1598) (probably register variation in the early 17th century)
s ending by analogy?
self/selfen explanation
new reflexive pronouns in -self, -selfen innovated, perhaps because Old French had reflexives including ‘se’ (same in Modern French).
how did the reorganisation of 2nd person pronouns work
– Middle English borrows use of plural as a formal singular from French
– formal form then spreads to become the unmarked form in the 14th and 15th centuries
– subject/object distinction lost in the formal/plural forms
