Adjectives

The changes in the grammatical properties of adjectives were even greater than in those of nouns and pronouns.

During the ME period the adjectives lost their gender and case distinctions altogether.

The peculiar suffix –en (from OE –an) of the weak declension lost its n.

Thus, the ME declension of adjectives looked like this:

	Sg.	Pl.
Strong declension	yong	yonge
Weak declension	yonge	yonge

In other words, it was still possible to distinguish between the strong and the weak form of an adjective in the singular (cf. The yonge sonne “the young sun” and a yong Squier “a young squire”) and between the singular and the plural forms of a strong adjective (cf. He was wis (E. wise), hise wordes weren so wise ‘his words were so wise’).

An innovation was the introduction of the analytical ways of building up the degrees of comparison with the help of more and most.

Verbs

More than a hundred of the Old English strong verbs were lost at the beginning of the Middle English period.

The morphology of the verb displayed two distinct tendencies of development: simplifying changes affected the synthetic forms of the verb, but the system became more complicated owing to the growth of new, analytical forms and new grammatical categories.

			ME	Early ModE
Infinitive			finde(n)	find
Present	1	sg.	finde	find
	2		findest/findes	findest
	3		findeth/findes	finds/findeth
	1-3	pl.	finde(n) findeth findest	find
Past	1 2 3 1-3	pl.	fand founde/fand/fondest fand founden	found

In the 13^th and 14^th c. the ending –en turned into the main, almost universal, marker of the plural forms of the verb. The variants –eth and –es in the Present tense were used only in the Southern and Northern dialects, respectively.

In the Past tense there was an additional distinctive feature between the singular and plural forms of strong verbs: different root – vowels.

But all the ways of indicating plural forms in the Present tense were unstable. The ending –en was frequently missed out in the late 14^th c. and was dropped in the 15^th c.

By the end of the 15^th c. the two forms of the Past tense of strong verbs fell together; fand and founde(n) were replaced by one form – found.

All number distinctions were thus lost with the exception of the 2^nd and 3^rd person, Present tense, sg.: -est (2^nd person), -eth/-es (3^rd person).

The distinctions in the 2^nd person sg. existed as long as the pronoun thou (OE Þū) was used. Beginning with the 15^th c. the plural forms of the 2^nd person – ye/you, your – were applied more and more often to individuals. In Shakespeare’s time the plural forms of the 2^nd person were widely used as equivalents of thou, thee, thine. Later thou became obsolete in Standard English.

Note: In Middle English the OE endings of the 3^rd person sg. (-þ, eþ, -iaþ) merged into a single ending –(e)th. The variant –es was a new marker first recorded in the Northern dialects. It was probably borrowed from the plural forms which usually ended in –es in the North. It spread to the singular and came to be used as a variant in the 2^nd and 3^rd person, but later was restricted to the 3^rd person. In Shakespeare’s sonnets the number of s-forms exceeds that of eth-forms.

In Early Modern English the distinction of tenses was preserved. As before, the Past tense was expressed with the help of the dental suffix in the weak verbs, and with the help of the root-vowel interchange in the strong verbs. After the loss of verbal endings the functional load of the root-vowel interchange grew. The only exception was a small group of verbs which came from OE weak verbs of Class I. In these verbs the dental suffix fused with the last consonant of the root [t] and after the loss of endings the three principal forms coincided:

OE	settan -	sette -	ge-set(ted)
ME	setan -	sette -	set
ModE	set -	set -	set

The most important feature of the history of the verb in ME was the development of analytical forms.

1. The syntactical combinations of OE sculan (ModE shall) and willan (ModE will) with the infinitive developed into analytical forms of the Future tense.

2. Combinations composed of different forms of OE habban (ModE have) and Participle II of other verbs developed into a set of analytical forms known as the perfect forms – the category of order (or time coordination).

3. Combinations comprising different forms of OE bēon/wesan (ModE be) and Participle II of other verbs developed into a set of analytical forms of the passive voice.