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Гос филология / Гос филология / 39.Development of the lexico nouns

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Development of the lexico-grammatical class of nouns.

Some scientists (Ilysh) consider it a lexico-gram category as most of the nouns belong to one gender, others (Arakin) find this category more gram than lexical, because the gender was not always reflected to the sex distinguish and noun could also belong to 2 genders. Some linguists (Rostorgueva) think that gender distinguish was not a gram category, it was a classifying feature, accounting alongside other features division into morphological classes. In late OE the gender tended to adjust to the semantics in most sentences. E.g. “withman” treated as feminine instead of masculine.

Category of Number

This category was well-distinguished in all the declensions with very few homonymous forms.

Sing. Pl.

fisc (fish) fiscas

ēāʒe (eye) ēāʒan

tōp (tooth) tēp

scip (ship) scipu

Category of Case

There were 4 cases: Nom, Gen, Dat, Akk.

  • Nom is a case of an active agent.

  • Gen nouns served as attributes to name.

  • Dat served a means and manner of the action.

  • Akk served as direct obj, as a recipient of the action.

The most remarkable in an elaborate system of declination. Total number of declinations exceeded 25. Historically the OE system was based on the number of features.

Characteristic features:

  • The PG stem suffix

  • The gender

  • The phonetic structure of the word

  • Phonetic change in the final syllable

The division of the nouns in all types of declension rests in the first place of all European Group – the stem suffix. The reason is not stated by scientists. We may suppose that the nouns having definite stems /// grouped on some semantic bases. In OE there were group of s-stems denoting children. In different Indo-European languages a group of r-stems denoted relatives.

The structure of a Noun

Originally the word consisted in 3 parts.

Pr.G. root + stem forming suffix + gr. ending

L.P.G stem suffix lost their derivation force and merged with other components of the word.

e.g. fisc – a – z – Goth. fiscs

The simplification and lose of suffixes was caused by the heavy Germanic word stress on the root. Nouns that are known to have had different stem suffix originally in OE acquired different endings in the same cases. E.g.

a-stems ō-stems n-stems

mūp-as, scip-u car-a, luf-a ham-an

Thus, in OE gram endings were added just straight to the root. New gram endings have no traces of the stem suffix as such. It an only be restored in the Special Linguistic Analysis. It is indexed in dictionaries. Original Stem Suffixes were formed by vowels and consonants. Thus, they were two principle groups of declension in OE: vowel declension (strong), consonantal declension (weak) and root declension.

Vowel declension comprises: a-stem

ō-stem

u-stem

i-stem

Consonantal declension comprises: n-stems (the majority)

r-stems

s-stems

That’s why sometimes it is called n-declension. By the end of this period, r-, s-stems were declined by analogy of a-stems. New form was constructed by adding gram ending to the root.

Strong declension: a-stems, only masculine and neuter nouns. Difference is seen in Nom and Acc Pl.

stānas (m) scipu (n) hān (n)

in the neuter nouns ending depended on 2 factors:

  • Number of syllables

  • Whether the root was short or long

The Nom and Acc Pl. monosyllabic neuter nouns

  • Short v. had ending -u- (scipu)

  • Long v. had no ending (bān)

In polysyllabic neuter nouns

  • Short root v. had no ending (////)

  • Long root v. had ending -u- (nūtenu)

Weak declension

  • N-stems: masculine, feminine, neuter

Masculine Feminine

Nom. nama cwene

Gen. naman cwenan

Dat. naman cwenan

Acc. naman cwenan

Root declension

Masculine Feminine Neuter

They did not contain any stem suffix.

Sing. Pl.

Nom. man men

Gen. mannes manna

Dat. men mannum

Acc. mann men

The OE Gender, being a classifying feature (and not a grammatical categorv proper) disappeared together with other distinctive features of the noun declensions. In the 1lth and 12th c. the gender of nouns was deprived of its main formal support - the weakened and levelled endings of adjectives and adjective pronouns ceased to indicate gender. Semantically gender was

associated with the differentiation of sex and therefore the formal group­ing into genders was smoothlv and naturally superseded by a semantic division into inanimate and animate nouns, with a further subdivision of the latter into male; and females.

The category of case under­went changes. The number of cases was reduced from 4 to 2. In the strong declension the Dat. was marked with –e in the Southern dialects, though not in the North or in the Midlands. The form without the ending soon prevailed in all areas, and Nom., Ace. and Dat. fell together. Henceforth they can be called Common case, as in present-day English. Only the Gen case was kept separate from the other forms, with more, explicit formal distinctions in the singular than in the plural. In the 14th c. the ending -es of the Gen. sg had be­come almost universal, there being only several exceptions -nouns which were preferably used in the uninflected form (names of relation­ships terminating in -r-, some proper names, and some nouns in stereo­typed phrases). In the pl the Gen. case had no special marker - it was not distinguished from the Comm. case as the ending -(e)s through analogy, had extended to the Gen. either from the Com case pl or, perhaps, from the Gen. sg. The formal distinction between cases in the pl was lost, except in the nouns which did not take -(e,)s in the pl. Several nouns with a weak plural form in -en or with a vowel interchange, such as oxen or men, added the marker of the Gen. case es to these forms: oxenes, mennes. In the 17th,18thc. a new graphic marker of the Gen. case came into use: the apostrophe -­e. g. man's, children's: this device could he employed only in writing; in oral speech the forms remained homonymous.

The reduction in the number of cases was linked up with a change in the meaning and functions of the surviving forms.The Comm. case, which resulted from the fusion of three OE cases assumed all the functions of the former Nom., Acc. and Dat., and also some functions of the Gen. The ME Comm. case had a very general meaning, which was made more specific by the context: prepositions, the meaning of the verb predicate, the word order. With the help of these weans it could express various meanings formerly belonging to different cases. The main function of the Ace. case -to present the direct object was fulfilled in ME by the Comm. case; the noun was placed next to the verb, or else its relations with the predicate were apparent from the meaning of the transitive verb and the noun.

The history of the Gen. Case requires special consideration. Though it survived as a distinct form, its use became more limited: it could not be employed in the function of an object to a verb or to an adjective. In ME the Gen. case is used only attributively, to modify a noun, but even in this function it has a rival -prepositional phrases, above all the phrases with the preposition of. The other grammatical category of the noun, Number proved to be the most stable of all the nominal categories. The noun preserved the formal distinction of two numbers through all the historical periods. Increased variation in Early ME did not obliterate number distinctions. On the contrary, it showed that more uniform markers of the pl spread by analogy to different morphological classes of nouns, and thus strength­ened the formal differentiation of number. In Late ME the ending -es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the pl. In Early NE it extended to more nouns - to the new words of the growing English vocabulary and to many words, which built their plural in a different way in ME or employed -es as one of the variant endings. The pl ending -es (as well as the ending -es of the Gen. case) underwent several phonetic changes: the voicing of fricatives and the loss of unstressed vowels in final syllables. The ME pl ending -era, used as a variant marker with some nouns lost its former productivity, so that in Standard Mod E it is found only in oxen, brethern, and children.