Formation of the plural from the historical point of view

Outline

1. Main trends of development. Analytical forms

2. Changes in the nominal system in Middle English

2.1. The noun

2.1.1. Formation of the plural from the historical point of view

2.2. The adjective

2.3. The pronoun

2.4. The article

3. Conclusions

1. Main trends of development. Analytical forms

Between the 10th and the 16th c., i.e. from Late OE to Early NE the ways of building up grammatical forms underwent considerable changes. In OE all the forms which can be included into morphological paradigms were synthetic. In ME and Early NE, grammatical forms could also be built in the analytical way, e.g. with the help of auxiliary words. The proportion of synthetic forms in the language had become very small, for many of the old synthetic forms had been lost and no new synthetic forms had developed. In the remaining synthetic forms of the ME and Early NE periods the means of form-building were the same as before: inflections, sound interchanges and suppletion; only prefixation, namely the prefix ¥e-, which was commonly used in OE to mark participle II, went out of use in Late ME.

Since ME is the period of the levelling of endings (H. Sweet), many earlier distinctions disappear. The reduction of declension, which had begun in OE (cf. the homonymous endings of nouns belonging to different types of declension in some cases), developed more intensively in the 11^th – 13^th centuries. In OE there existed a variety of distinct endings differing in consonants as well as in vowels. In ME all the vowels in the endings were reduced to the neutral [ə] and many consonants were levelled under -n or dropped. The process of levelling, besides phonetic weakening, implies replacement of inflections by analogy, e.g. -(e)s as a marker of plural forms of nouns displaced the endings -(e)n and -e. In the transition to NE most of the grammatical endings were dropped.

Reduction of the morphological system developed more quickly in the Northern dialect, which was followed by the Midland.

The analyticalway of form-building was a new device, which developed in Late OE and ME and came to occupy a most important place in the grammatical system. Analytical forms developed from free word groups (phrases, syntactical constructions). The first component of these phrases gradually weakened or even lost its lexical meaning and turned into a grammatical marker, while the second component retained its lexical meaning and acquired a new grammatical value in the compound form.

Analytical form-building was not equally productive in all the parts of speech: it transformed the morphology of the verb but did not affect the noun.

Changes in the nominal system in Middle English

The main direction of development for the nominal parts of speech in the ME period can be defined as morphological simplification.

Within the period between c. 1000 and 1300 called an “Age of Great Changes” (A.Baugh), the nominal morphological system underwent significant transformations. Some nominal categories were lost – gender and case in adjectives, gender in nouns; the number of forms distinguished in the surviving categories was reduced – cases in nouns and noun-pronouns, numbers in personal pronouns. Morphological division into types of declension practically disappeared. In Late ME the adjective lost the distinctionof number and the distinction of weak and strong forms.

At the time of Chaucer the English nominal system was very much like modern.

The noun

The OE noun had the grammatical categories of gender, 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 disrupted the grouping of nouns into morphological classes.

The OE grammatical gender disappeared together with other distinctive featuresof the noun declensions. In the 11^th and 12^th c. the gender of nouns was deprived of its main formal support – the weakened and levelled endings of adjectives and adjective pronouns ceased to indicate gender. Semantically gender was associated with the differentiation of sex and therefore the formal grouping into genders was smoothly and naturally superceded by a semantic division into inanimate and animate nouns, with a further subdivision of the latter into males and females.

In Chaucer’s time gender is a lexical category, like in Mod E: nouns are referred to as “he” and “she” if they denote human beings.

Intensive simplification of the system of endings in different cases of nouns obliterated the distinction between the forms within the paradigms and the differences between the declensions. In the 11^th – 12^th c. reduction of unstressed endings became common, and in the 12^th- 13^th c. the former unstressed and reduced endings were often dropped, e.g.

OE þånne > þane > þan > than, then

butān > būta > bute > but

hlæfdi¥e > laffdi¥ > lady.

At the end of the 14^th c. dropping of the reduced unstressed endings, which was characteristic of all the dialects then, caused unification of cases:

a) the nominative case singular, ending in –a, -e, -u,and the nominative, genitive and accusative plural, ending in –a, acquired the common ending –e, which was lost later;

b) the nominative, genitive, accusative plural, ending in –an, -en,the dative, ending in –um, and the genitive, dative, accusative singular, ending in –an, were simplified into –en [ən] > -e [ə] > ;

c) the nominative, accusative plural, ending in –as, and the genitive singular, ending in –es, yielded the form –es, which was retained for a rather long time; later –es [əs] > -s ([iz] after –s, -x etc.).

The most numerous OE morphological classes of nouns were a-stems, ō-stems and n-stems. The vocalic stems tended to be declined in accordance with the a-stems paradigm, and the consonantal stems – with the n-stems paradigm. However, due to the dropping of unstressed endings these two types of declension lost their distinctions and merged into one type with the following paradigm:

SingularPlural

Formation of the plural from the historical point of view

There are six principal ways of formation of the plural in Modern English:

1. The most productive suffix is –(e)s,which originates from the plural ending –astypical of masculine gender (strong declension, a-stem). Thus, OE –as >ME es >NE –(e)s.

2. The suffix –en(ox – oxen, child – children) originates from the plural ending, weak declension –an: OE –an> ME –en.In OE many nouns of all genders were declined according to weak declension. In ME there was a struggle between the plural endings –esand –en. In the South of the country the ending –enprevailed, whereas in the North the ending –eswas mostly used. In the 15^th c. the ending –enfell out of use. In MnE there is only one noun which originally belonged to OE weak

declension, i.e. ox – oxen. Other nouns with the same suffix in Mod E, brethren and children, belonged to minor declension type, r-stem and es-stem, respectively, which had no ending –enin their paradigms. This ending appeared in MnE by analogy with the weak declension paradigm, because their plural ending OE –ru >ME–re >MnE–renwas not understood as the plural ending.

3. Changing the root vowel originates from the root-vowel declension, in which the root vowel of a noun was influenced by palatal mutation in the dative singular and nominative and accusative plural: Mod E foot – feet, man – men, etc.

4. Nouns ending in –f(e)do not always change –f(e)into –ves: some nouns mostly borrowed from other languages only add the ending –s: roof – roofs, chief – chiefs. Some nouns have parallel forms, e.g.: hoof – hoofs and hooves, scarf – scarfs and scarves. The prevailing tendency in Germanic languages is, however, changing –f(e)into –veswhich can be accounted for by the pronunciation of the letter fas a voiced consonant [v] in the intervocal position. In ME the letter vwas introduced by the French scribes, Thus, OE cnifas[v] > ME knives > NE knives.

5. Several nouns in Mod E have the same form both in the singular and in the plural, e.g. sheep, deer, swine. In OE there were many more nouns of this kind all of them belonging to a-stem declension, neuter gender. In OE these nouns had no plural inflexion.

6. A number of nouns having scientific, literary, political meaning, borrowed from Latin and Greek in the 17^th c. – 19^th c., kept their Latin or Greek plural inflexion, e.g. phenomenon – phenomena, stimulus – stimuli, genius – genii, etc. These nouns were used by a limited number of people, and due to their narrow usage they have preserved their original plural inflexions up to present.

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 other grammatical category of the noun, Number proved to be the most stable of all the nominal categories. In OE the category of number was interwoven with the category of case. Thus, in masc. a-stems the ending –asexpressed simultaneously the category of case (nominative, accusative) and that of number (plural). The same applies to other case forms. There was no sign of the plural which might be found in every plural form. This was a feature typical of synthetic structure.

In ME there came a radical change in this respect: the expression of number was separated from that of case. So there is a great fundamental difference between the OE ending –as and the ME ending –es: while the OE –as expressed number and case simultaneously, ME –esexpresses number alone and is not connected with any notion of case. This is an important innovation in ME.

The noun preserved the formal distinction of two numbers through all the historical periods. The plural forms in ME show obvious traces of numerous OE noun declensions. Some of these traces have survived in later periods. In Late ME the ending -es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the plural.

The adjective

In the course of the ME period the adjective underwent greater simplifying changes than any other part of speech. It lost all its grammatical categories with the exception of the degrees of comparison.

In OE the adjective was declined to show the gender, case and number of the noun it modified; it had a five-case paradigm and two types of declension, weak and strong.

By the end of the OE period the agreement of the adjective with the noun had become looser and in the course of Early ME it was practically lost.

The first category to disappear was gender, which ceased to be distinguished by the adjective in the 11 c.

The number of cases shown in the adjective paradigm was reduced: the Instr. case had fused with the Dat. by the end of OE; distinction of other cases in Early ME was unsteady, as many variant forms of different cases, which arose in Early ME, coincided. In the 13th c. case could be shown only by some variable adjective endings in the strong declension (but not by the weak forms); towards the end of the century all case distinctions were lost.

The strong and weak forms of adjectives were often confused in Early ME texts. The use of a strong form after a demonstrative pronoun was not uncommon, though according to the existing rules, this position belonged to the weak form.

In the 14th c. the difference between the strong and weak form is sometimes shown in the singular with the help of the ending –e.

Number was certainly the most stable nominal category in all the periods. In the 14th c. plural forms were sometimes contrasted to the singular forms with the help of the ending -e in the strong declension. In the 13th and particularly 14th c. there appeared a new plural ending -s. The use of -s is attributed either to the influence of French adjectives, which take -s in the plural or to the influence of the ending -s of nouns. In the age of Chaucer the paradigm of the adjective consisted of four forms distinguished by a single vocalic ending -e.

Table 8.1