The Noun. ME and Early New English Nominals

ME and Early New English Nominals

Лекция 8

A. Decay of Noun Declensions in Early Middle English

The OE noun had the grammatical categories of Number and Case which were formally distinguished in an elaborate system of declensions. However, homonymous forms in the OE noun paradigms neutralised some of the grammatical oppositions; similar endings employed in different declensions — as well as the influence of some types upon other types — disrupted the grouping of nouns into morphological classes.

Increased variation of the noun forms in the late 10th c. and especially in the 11th and 12th c. testifies to a strong tendency toward a re-arrangement and simplification of the declensions. The number of variants of grammatical forms in the 11th and 12th c. was twice as high as in the preceding centuries. For instance, Early ME fisshes and bootes, direct descendants of the OE Nom. and Acc. pl of Masc. a-stems — fiscas, b ā tas —were used, as before, in the position of these cases and could also be used as variant forms of other cases — Gen. and Dat. pl — alongside the historical forms fisshe, boote (NE fish, boat). As long as all these variants co-existed, it was possible to mark a form more precisely by using a variant with a fuller ending, but when some of the variants went out of use and the non-distinctive, levelled variants prevailed, many forms fell together. Thus after passing through the "variation stage" many formal oppositions were lost.

The decline of the OE declension system lasted over three hundred years and revealed considerable dialectal differences. It started in the North of England and gradually spread southwards. The decay of inflectional endings in the Northern dialects began as early as the 10th c. and was virtually completed in the 11th; in the Midlands the process extended over the 12th c, while in the Southern dialects it lasted till the end of the 13th (in the dialect of Kent, the old inflectional forms were partly preserved even in the 14th c).

The dialects differed not only in the chronology but also in the nature of changes. The Southern dialects re-arranged and simplified the noun declensions on the basis of stem and gender distinctions. In Early ME they employed only four markers — -es, -en, -e, and the root-vowel interchange — plus the bare stem (the "zero"-inflection) — but distinguished, with the help of these devices, several paradigms.

In the Midland and Northern dialects the system of declension was much simpler. In fact, there was only one major type of declension and a few traces of other types. The majority of nouns took the endings of OE Masc. a-stems: -(e)s in the Gen. sg (from OE -es), -(e)s in the pl irrespective of case.

In Late ME, when the Southern traits were replaced by Central and Northern traits in the dialect of London, this pattern of noun declensions prevailed in literary English.

Simplification of noun morphology affected the grammatical categories of the noun in different ways and to a varying degree.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-20