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

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

2.1.3.  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

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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):

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genitive case noun dative

accusative

(* There was also made a distinction between weak and strong adjectives)

(** Instrumentals occured in certain parts of the adjective and pronoun declension (Fischer

40) )

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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):

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).

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2.1.2. Declension of nouns with vowel stems

Nouns were inflected according to which stem-group they belonged to in proto-Germanic. (Singh 81)

First of all we can take a look at nouns with vowel stems (the proto-Germanic translations are taken from Robert Longman’s website “A Proto-Germanic wordhoard”

).

English) [hundaz] [diuzas] [gibitz] [proto-Germanic]

As it can be relatively clearly be seen, the Modern English possessive suffix -‘s as well as the plural suffix -s derive from the Old English masculine a-stem declension (Singh 82).

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2.1.3. Declension of nouns with consonant stems

The second declension group includes words that belong to a consonant stem.

English)

[proto-Germanic]

The n-stem plural is still used in Modern English but there are only single examples like oxen or the very restricted brethren (Singh 82).

2.1.4. Definite article “the”

Like nouns also the definite articles that were linked to them had to be declined. In the singular there are different articles for masculine, feminine and neuter words, in the plural (like in Modern German) the forms are identical for all three genders. A striking feature of Old English definite articles and their inflected forms is that they strongly resemble the Modern German articles (Jucker 26).

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