The Nominal Grammatical Categories in EME and LME

Seminar No. 12
1. Compare the historical productivity of different form-building means: synthetic (inflections, sound
interchanges), analytical, suppletive.
2. Which part of speech has lost the greatest number of grammatical categories? Which part of speech has
acquired new categories?
3. Describe the sources of the modern plural forms of nouns and the spread of the ending (e)s.
4. What traces of the OE n-stem and root-stem declensions can we find in NE plural forms of nouns?
5. Comment on the forms of nouns: foot feet; child children; deer deer; ox oxen; axis axes.
6. Compare the development of case and number in nouns, adjectives and pronouns in ME.
7. Illustrate the process of replacement by tracing the history of the pronouns she, they, their, him, you, its.
Personal and Possessive Pronouns in ME and Early NE
Person
1st p.
Nom.
Obj. (from OE
Acc. and Dat.)
Poss. (from OE
Gen.)
2nd p.
Nom.
Obj. (from OE
Acc. and Dat.)
Poss. (from OE
Gen.)
3rd p.
Nom.
Obj. (from OE
Acc. and Dat.)
Poss. (from OE
Gen.)

Singular
ME
Early NE

Plural
ME

Early NE

Ich/I
me

I
me

we
us

we
us

myn(e)/my

my/mine

our(e)/ours

our, ours

thou/thow
thee

thou/ye
thee/you

ye
you

you/ye
you

thyn(e)/thy

thy/your/thine/yo
urs

your(e)/yours

your, yours

he, she, it
him, her, it

hie/they
hem/them

they
them

his, her, his/its

his, hers, his/its

her(e)/their(e)

their
theirs

M. F.
N.
he he/she hit/it
him hir(e)/ him/
her
it
his her(e)/ his
hir

8. What is the connection between the growth of articles, the history of pronouns and the decline of
adjectival declensions?
9. What changed in the category of the degrees of comparison of adjectives and which means were used to
form the degrees of comparison?
10. In which syntactic functions were weak forms of adjectives used in the 14th century? Give examples.
Declension of Adjectives in LME
sg
pl
blind
blinde
Strong
blinde
blinde
Weak

11. Text for analysis from the prologue to Canterbury Tales by G. Chaucer
Read the text and translate it into Modern English using the notes and the Glossary in the book. Reconstruct the
history of the italicized words from OE to NE (origin, spelling, pronunciation, grammatical forms and
structure). Point out the borrowings.
285: A clerk ther was of Oxenford also,
297: But al be that he was a philosophre,
286: That unto logyk hadde longe y-go.
298: Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;
287: As leene was his hors as is a rake,
299: But al that he myghte of his freendes hente,
288: And he nas nat right fat, I undertake,
300: On bookes and on lernynge he it spente,
289: But looked holwe, and therto sobrely.
301: And bisily gan for the soules preye
290: Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy;
302: Of hem that yaf hym wherwith to scoleye.
291: For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice,
303: Of studie took he moost cure and moost
292: Ne was so worldly for to have office.
heede,
293: For hym was levere have at his beddes heed 304: Noght o word spak he moore than was
294: Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,
neede,
295: Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
305: And that was seyd in forme and reverence,
296: Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie.
306: And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence;
307: Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche,
308: And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.
12. Determine whether the statement is true or false:
1) The decline of the OE declension system lasted over three hundred years and started in the North of
England.
2) In the Midland and Northern dialects the system of declension was much more complicated.
3) The declension of nouns in the age of Chaucer was the same as in NE.
4) The OE Gender turned into a grammatical category in ME.
5) In Chaucers time gender is not a lexical category like in NE.
6) The grammatical category of case was preserved and there were four grammatical cases in ME.
7) In the strong declension the Dative was sometimes marked by e in the Southern dialects.
8) Only the Genitive case was kept as a separate from the other forms, with more explicit formal
distinctions in the singular than in plural.
9) The Common Case, which resulted from the fusion of three OE cases assumed all the functions of the
former Nominative, Accusative and Dative, and also some functions of the Genitive.
10) The grammatical category of number for the noun proved to be the most stable of all nominal
categories. It preserved the formal distinction of two numbers through all historical periods.
11) The new feminine pronoun, LME she was borrowed from Scandinavian.
12) The OE pronoun of the 3rd person he was replaced by the Scandinavian loan word they.
13) Some possessive pronouns had two variant forms in ME: myne/my, our(e)/ours, etc.
14) The other directions of the development of the demonstrative pronouns s, so, t led to the
formation of the definite article.
15) Another factor which may account for the less regular use of the article was the changing function of
the word order.
16) Most indefinite pronouns of the OE period simplified their morphological structure and some
pronouns fell out of use.
17) The first category to disappear was Gender, which ceased to be distinguished by the adjective in the
11th century.
18) The strong and weak forms of the adjectives were quite distinct in EME texts.
19) In ME the degrees of comparison could be built in the same way, only the suffixes had been
weakened to er, -est and the interchange of the root vowel was less common than before.
20) Another curious peculiarity observed in ENE texts is the use of the so called double comparatives
and double superlatives.