CREATOR
CHELSEA NICHOLSON
Morphology and Syntax
The English language has defiantly become easier as it has evolved. In Old English there were many different ways to represent each noun and pronoun that we now have in Modern English. This was because of the words case, meaning that the spelling of the word represented its role in a sentence. There were 4 main cases of the Old English which are presented in the table below:
Old English also categorised nouns into gender. The genders did not refer to the biological sex or sexlessness of objects. There were 3 noun gender classes in Old English which are presented below:
Determiners, such as 'the,' and adjectives, had to agree with their nouns in case, gender and also number.
For example, the word 'the' in Old English could be written 3 different ways. These include:
É“o(n)ne
accusative
masculine
singular
É“am
dative
masculine
plural
É“a
accusative
masculine
plural
Referring to the above versions of 'the,' we can now translate the determiner according to these rules. So this has been demonstrated below:
Please go get the student.
Please go get the students.
I gave the students the book.
É“one
É“a
É“am
É“one
There was then the disappearance of the case and gender system in Old English, which is responsible for profound changes elsewhere in our grammar. In Modern English, what was once represented by the gender and case system, is now shown by word order. This was because English shifted from a synthetic language, where inflections signalled the relationships between words, to an analytical language, where this information is signalled by word order or function words like prepositions and auxiliaries.
Analogy is a process of language in which speakers apply widespread patterns to a new or exceptional case. An excellent example of this is the plural -s. Nouns used to have different endings or vowel changes to signify plural, but this was interlinked with the properties of case and gender. This made it very complicated and so when the plural maker of -s came in, it spread rapidly. This was the first time that English had a plural marker and so by the end of the 14th century it overtook the noun system as the language wide plural marker. At one point -en looked like it would form our plurals, but that was quickly demolished.
Nouns
Verbs
As mentioned above, English is an analytical language and no longer a synthetic language. The english language has suffered a dramatic loss of inflections because of this, but has made up for this with the increased use of auxiliaries and fixed word order, meaning that the word order provides a key to understanding the relationships between words in a clause.
The verb 'be' is an example of linguistic fossil as it is the only verb to preserve something of the Old English inflectional system. Irregular verbs such as fly-flew are less common today than they were in Old English. The two types of verbs are:
irregular verbs (strong) - verbs that create past tense and past participle forms by internal modification rather than taking an inflectional affix eg. wear - worn
regular verbs (weak) - verbs that make use of regular inflectional affixes to indicate changes in tense and aspect eg. play - played
There are less than 60 of the original 350 strong verbs from Old English that remain today. Despite the strength of the verb types given, the strong verbs are anything but strong, they are very weak and in the past millennium we have seen the slow demise of them.