University of Innsbruck, Faculty of Humanities 2, Department of English
PS English Word Formation, 28th February, 2006

Diachrone Inflection - An Outline of the Development of the
Inflectional System from Old English to Modern English

by: Stefan Hinterholzer

Index

1. Diachrone Inflection  3

2. Old English 3

2.1. Nouns 5

2.1.1. Case and gender  5
2.1.2. Noun declension of nouns with vowel stems 6
2.1.3. Noun declension of nouns with consonant stems 6
2.1.4. Forms of the definite article “the” 7

2.2. Adjectives 8

2.2.1. Adjectival declension of adjectives modifying masculine nouns 8
2.2.2. Adjectival declension of adjectives modifying feminine nouns  9
2.2.3. Adjectival declension of adjectives modifying neuter nouns  9
2.2.4. Comparative and superlative 9

2.3. Personal pronouns 10
2.4. Verbs 11

2.4.1. Present conjugation: indicative and subjunctive 11
2.4.2. Conjugation of weak verbs 12
2.4.3. Conjugation of strong verbs 12
2.4.4. Preterite conjugations  13

3. Middle English  13

3.1. Nouns  15
3.2. Adjectives 16
3.3. Personal Pronouns 16
3.4. Verbs  17

3.4.1. Present conjugations: indicative and subjunctive  17
3.4.2. Preterite conjugations 18

4. Early Modern English 19

4.1. Nouns 20
4.2. Adjectives 21
4.3. Personal Pronouns 21
4.4. Verbs 22

5. Modern English 23

6. Summary 25

7. Bibliography 27

1. Diachrone Inflection

Diachrone analyses of a language analyze the state of a language at different periods of time or its development throughout time. Today English is a language that is almost uninflected, but this has not always been the case. The Old English language had many inflectional distinctions, which got almost totally lost throughout time.

In this research paper I will show the different states of the inflectional system in the Old, Middle, Early Modern and Modern English. Furthermore, there will be shown and clarified the dramatic loss of inflectional distinctions in the English language. The tables in this research paper are partly adapted from books, partly slightly modified and partly created on my own by summarizing information of texts or results of this research paper in a table.

2. Old English

The Old English period lasts from about 450 to 1150. Nevertheless, there is hardly any documentation before 700. The earliest texts are glossaries of Latin words that were translated into English as well as inscriptions and a few poems. And even of these texts only a few have survived (Jucker 15).

In contrast to Modern English, Old English makes use of morphs that carry more than one unit of lexical or grammatical information for the inflection of words (Singh 78) and has far more inflectional endings. Furthermore Old English distinguishes different grammatical features of nouns/adjectives/pronouns and verbs than Modern English. For example, Old English distinguishes between indicative and subjunctive mood with verbs and different cases with nouns, but does not mark the passive, the perfect or the future through inflection (Fischer 40; Jucker 27-28):

[table only downloadfile]

In the following chapters the focus will be on the expression of these grammatical features and more precisely on the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns as well as on the conjugation of verbs.

2.1. Nouns

2.1.1. Case and gender

Since the distinctions of case and gender do not exist any more in Modern English these distinctions shall be briefly explained here. The cases that exist in the declension of nouns are nominative, genitive, dative and accusative. Each case has a separate inflectional ending (case ending) which indicates “the function of relationship of words to other words in the sentence” (Culpeper 48):

[table only downloadfile]

When we talk about gender we must be aware of the fact that the gender of a word must not necessarily be the same as the gender of the object or person that it expresses. The noun “wif” (“woman”, “wife”) was despite of all its femaleness neuter and referred to as “hit” (“it”). Nevertheless there is a general tendency of congruency.

There can be made a general distinction between two categories of nouns: “human animates” (e.g. man, woman, boy, girl) and “non-animated” (e.g. table, chair, house, street). In the category of “human animates” words generally have a natural gender (e.g. “guma” (“man”) masculine), whereas words belonging to the category of “non-animates” have a grammatical gender that is rather arbitrary (e.g. “boc” (“book”) is feminine) (Singh 79-80).

2.1.2. Declension of nouns with vowel stems

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