History of the English Language Middle English Morphology

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History of the English Language Middle English Morphology – Lecture 2 1.1. Loss of inflectional endings cataclysmic changes in inflectional morphology. By the end of the ME period, English had only a handful of leftover inflections. besides the loss of inflection, there came the loss of grammatical gender as well. nouns = reduced to two cases (possessive and non-possessive) adjectives = had lost all inflections as well as the earlier distinction between weak and strong adjectives. personal endings of verbs were reduced and mood distinctions blurred. personal pronouns = relatively intact, but the distinction between plural and dual number had vanished. There is no single, simple answer to the question why English should have renounced its Indo-European heritage and changed from a synthetic, inflecting language to an analytic language dependent on word order and particles for indicating the relationships among the words in a sentence. Standard explanation: exposed to and confused by various by the varying inflectional systems of three different languages (English, French and Scandinavian), English speakers abandoned inflections entirely. = not sufficient Reasons: 1) the process was well under way in English before the conquest. French would have tended to support, though not necessarily cause, inflectional loss in English because Old French itself preserved only a distinction between singular and plural. Furthermore, the plural ended in –s, the same ending that was to become universal for the plural in English. 2) Scandinavian influence was heavy only in certain areas of the country; besides, the inflectional systems of ON and OE were quite similar for many classes of nouns and adjectives (verbal inflections differed more, but English lost fewer verbal inflections than noun and adjective inflections.) One important contributing factor to the loss of inflections in

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