Changes in the morphological system from Old to Middle English, with special reference to the noun phrase

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to show how English language has changed over time in one particular grammatical domain: the noun phrase, focusing on the morphological changes that affected nouns, adjectives and demonstratives from Old English to Middle English and on the transformation from synthetic to analytic language. Old English was a highly inflected language, i.e. grammatical meaning was indicated mainly through the use of inflections. Most of these inflections disappeared in the course of Middle English, when English became a more analytic language. The first part of the dissertation is devoted to the characterization of the three relevant word classes, which were highly inflected in Old English. Nouns showed inflections according to gender, case and number and belonged to various declensions. Old English had grammatical gender and each noun was classified as masculine, feminine or neuter. As regards case, Old English nouns showed four different cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative, and two numbers: singular and plural. Adjectives also had inflections for gender, case and number and they were inflected according to two declensions, the strong declension and the weak declension. Moreover, Old English had a very complicated system of demonstratives, which were inflected for number, case and gender in agreement with the noun that they accompanied. In the second part of the dissertation, I focus on Middle English, when we see the radical simplification of the Old English inflectional system due to two major factors. The first one has to do with phonology and it is related to the reduction of vowels in non-accented syllables which caused the levelling of inflections; the reduction consisted of the centralization of the vowels to schwa. The second cause for the simplification of the inflectional system has to do with analogy, which implies the regularization of irregular forms from the language as a result of “a process by which one form becomes like another one with which it is somehow associated (such as having the same function)” (Brinton and Arnovick 2006:70). In the final part of the dissertation I compare parallel texts from Old English and Middle English to illustrate some of the changes discussed in the theoretical part of the study