2.4. Evolution of categories of number

The other grammatical category of the noun is number proved to be the most stable of the nominal categories. The noun preserved the formal distinction of two numbers through all the historical periods. In Late ME the ending –es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the pl. It underwent several phonetic changes: the voicing of fricatives and the loss of unstressed vowels in final syllables:

1) after a voiced consonant or a vowel, e.g. ME stones [΄sto:nəs] > [΄stounəz] > [΄stounz], NE stones;

2) after a voiceless consonant, e.g. ME bookes [΄bo:kəs] > [bu:ks] > [buks], NE books;

3) after sibilants and affricates [s, z, ∫, t∫, dз] ME dishes [΄di∫əs] > [΄di∫iz], NE dishes.

The ME pl ending –en, used as a variant marker with some nouns lost its former productivity, so that in Standard Mod E it is found only in oxen, brethren, and children. The small group of ME nouns with homonymous forms of number has been further reduced to three exceptions in Mod E: deer, sheep, and swine.

The group of former root-stems has survived also only as exceptions: man, tooth and the like.

CONCLUSIONS

So, Middle English period began with the Norman Conquest in 1066. The language was still inflectional and the relationship between the words in the sentence depended basically on word order. Also there were a lot of changes in the system of spelling. It was the French influence. Some of them reflected the sound changes which had been completed or were still in progress. Others were graphic replacements of Old English letters by new letters and diagraphs. In Middle English runic letters passed put of use. And were displaced by the diagraph th, which retained the same sound value [Ө] or [ð]. The letter 3 was replaced by g or j.

There were many innovations in Middle English spelling. The diagraph ou, ie, ch which occurred in many French words were adapted.

In the early period of Middle English, a number of utilitarian words came into the language from Old Norse, such as egg, sky, sister, window, and get. The Normans brought other additions to the vocabulary. Before 1250 about 900 new words had appeared in English, mainly words, such as baron, noble, and feast, that the Anglo-Saxon lower classes required in their dealings with the Norman-French nobility. Finally, the Norman nobility and clergy introduced the French words pertaining to the government, the church, the army, and the fashions of the court, arts, scholarship, and medicine.

Indeed, there is less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical information in English. Change was gradual, and has different outcomes in different regional varieties of Middle English, but the ultimate effects were huge: the grammar of English was radically different from that of Old English. The range of inflections, particularly in the noun, was reduced drastically (partly as a result of reduction of vowels in unstressed final syllables), as was the number of distinct paradigms: in most early Middle English texts most nouns have distinctive forms only for singular or plural, genitive, and occasional traces of the old dative in forms. In some other parts of the system some distinctions were more persistent, but by late Middle English the range of endings and their use among London writers shows relatively few differences from the sixteenth-century language of, for example Shakespeare- probably the most prominent morphological difference from Shakespeare’s language is that verb plurals and infinitives still generally ended in –en (at least in writing).

Also, English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the stylistic register of those words which survived from Old English. Eventually, various new stylistic layers emerged in the lexicon, which could be employed for a variety of different purposes.

The grammatical category of gender was lost in Middle English. In Chaucer’s time gender was a lexical (semantic) category, like in Modern English.(nouns are referred to as “he” or “she” if they denote human beings and as “it” if they denote animals and inanimale thing).

In Middle English the number of cases reduced from 4 to 2. The syncretism of cases lasted for many years. In Middle English the system of declension became more regular and uniform. Homonymous forms in Old English noun paradigms caused neutralization of the grammatical oppositions; similar endings, employed in different declensions, disrupted the group of nouns into morphological classes. The grammatical category of Number proved to be the most stable of all nominal categories. Two numbers have been preserved through all historical periods.

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