Grammatical Changes In The Middle English Period

It is undisputable that Middle English was a phase of dramatic grammatical change. In the space of four centuries, English was transformed from a "half-inflected" language, retaining four of the eight original Indo-European cases (Mitchell and Robinson, 1964), to a fairly analytic language, heavily reliant on word order, prepositions and periphrastic constructions. Middle English is traditionally taken to start with the Norman Conquest or shortly thereafter, and with good reason. The Conquest was a momentous event: under the new rulers, the Court, administration, education, law and culture all switched to Norman French. Even after the political links with Normandy were severed in 1204, the Angevin dynasty made of England a cultural colony, replacing Norman with Central French. This takeover had a profound effect on the native language: when English resurfaced in the 14th century, much of the native Anglo-Saxon vocabulary had been lost, the spelling had been reformed by French-speaking scribes to suit their own conventions, and the pronunciation too had evolved away from Old English. However, for what regards grammar, the main developments had already started in the tenth century, and the Conquest's contribution to these was merely an indirect one: by ousting English from its official position, thus lifting the conservative shackles of a written standard and educated upper class, it allowed the transformations to take place unrestrained. Like other Germanic languages, Old English had a case system and genders. Its case system comprised nominative, accusative, genitive and dative, plus an instrumental case that gradually merged with the dative, and traces of an old locative case (Mitchell and Robinson, 1964). There were three genders, and vestiges of a dual number, in addition to singular and plural. Determiners and adjectives agreed in case, gender and number with the nouns they modified. Verbs too were inflected for mood, tense, person and number. As mentioned before, this inflectional system had started to erode even before the Middle English period (according to Baugh and Cable, evidence for the levelling of inflections is visible in 10th century documents). Mitchell and Robinson (1964) identify the antecedent for the loss of inflections in the tendency of the Germanic languages to place the stress on the first syllable of words, in contrast with the variable stress pattern of Indo-European. This resulted in a system of unstressed inflectional endings that was, as Penhallurick (2003) points out, inherently vulnerable, as the vowels they contained all tended to schwa in the spoken language. Besides, not all cases had distinctive endings: Barber (1993) observes that, while in early Middle English the four cases were still distinct in the singular and plural, "in the course of the period there is a tendency to reduce the total number of forms to three: one for the nominative and accusative singular [.], one for the genitive singular [.], and one for all plural uses" (p. 159). In the North, where -es rather than -en was used for the plural, which was thus identical to the genitive, the paradigm was further shrunk to just two forms. Word-initial stress cannot completely explain a near-total demise of inflections, which were retained in other Germanic initial-stress languages (Fischer, 1992), but a further event was instrumental in accelerating and consolidating change. When, in the 9th century, the Vikings settled in the Northeast, in what became known as the Danelaw, the Scandinavian invaders and the native Anglo-Saxon population found that their differing inflectional endings stood in the way of otherwise mutually intelligible languages. Suffixes thus started to be dispensed with altogether, leaving only the roots for communication, in a process analogous to the creation of a pidgin. The innovation gradually spread southwards, together with a few more grammatical products of the contact with the Danes, among which the third person plural pronouns they-them-their (in place of the autoctonous hi-hem-here), the plural conjugation of the present tense of "to be", are, which replaced Old English sind/sint, and the preposition with (originally indicating opposition, as in withstand) displacing mid. Mitchell and Robinson (1964) also point out that in the same period French was undergoing similar developments concerning inflections and word order, and these may have acted as a further reinforcement of the English trend. The levelling of inflections was to have a knock-on effect on several aspects of grammar and become the single most important factor in the transformation of English from a fundamentally fusional to a much more analytic language, as alternative means were needed to specify the relations between words and disambiguating meaning. These means were found in the increased use of prepositions and a fixed word order. During the course of the Middle English period, an increasingly consistent Subject-Verb-Object order emerged, replacing the OE virtually free order, usually tending to Subject-Object-Verb. As Closs Traugott (1972) reminds us, the process was a gradual one: especially in early Middle English "we can only speak of tendencies", as documents such as the Peterborough Chronicle show that "all the older patterns are still available" (p.160). In main clauses the subject still often followed the verb, particularly after a negative word, an indirect object or an adverb (Crystal, 1995). The transition between the two modalities is clearly visible from instances of both inflections and word order overlapping within one sentence to carry out the same function (Mitchell and Robinson, 1964). Conversely, there are passages in the Peterborough Chronicle where "the word order looked much like that of Old English at a time when the inflectional system looked much like that of Modern English" (Baugh and Cable, 1951, p. 163), or in yet other cases, dative pronouns might be used without the preposition to (Freeborn, 1992). It is interesting to note that the growing preference for periphrases over inflections manifested itself even within the only case that has survived into Modern English. The postmodifying genitive x of y in place of y's x was not unknown in Old English, but it was in the ME period, possibly under the influence of the French de construction, that it firmly established itself: Crystal (1995) estimates that as many as 80% of late ME genitives followed this pattern. The group genitive - where the marking was attached to the last member of a complex noun phrase rather than its head - is also a ME development. Previously, phrases like the Duke of Brittany's brother were rendered as the Duke's brother of Brittany (Closs Traugott, 1972). The first instances of the group genitive are found in Chaucer (albeit coexisting with constructions like Wyves Tale of Bath), and grew to become the preferred construction by the end of the period. Another phenomenon affecting the genitive in Middle English, and which will become even more common in early Modern English, is the replacement of the inflection -s with the possessive pronoun his. This treatment, which in Old English, according to Closs Traugott, was reserved exclusively to foreign nouns, gave rise both to the erroneous belief that the inflection was in fact the contraction of his (although no parallel her construction was used) and, as a consequence, to the apostrophe marking possessives in present-day English. The levelling of inflections also played a role in the loss of grammatical gender. Baugh and Cable (1951) point out that the gender of OE nouns was indicated not so much by their declension, as by the determiners and adjectives agreeing with them. As a consequence, "when the inflections of these gender-distinguishing words were reduced to a single ending for the adjective, and the fixed forms of the, this, that, these, and those for the demonstratives, the support for grammatical gender was removed" (p. 162). Closs Traugott (1972) also notices that some inflections (the example she uses is the -ne of the masculine singular accusative) came to be considered indicative of their case irrespective of gender (in this case, -ne came to be applied to feminine nouns as well). This phenomenon too contributed to the blurring of grammatical gender, which at first sight looks like another process on which the takeover by French-speaking peoples did not have much bearing. Both Claiborne (1990) and Closs Traugott, however, mention the clash between French and English genders as instrumental in the erosion of English ones. As they point out, not only had English retained the neuter case, which had disappeared from French, but masculine and feminine nouns did not coincide in the two languages either. According to this view, the confusion arising in translation is at least partly to blame for the disappearance of gender distinctions from English. Another morphological area affected by losses and simplifications in the course of Middle English is that of number. In addition to singular and plural, the Germanic languages had inherited from Indo-European a dual number, which survived in Old English in the pronouns wit (we two) and git (you two). These forms grew increasingly formulaic early on in the course of Middle English, and were finally dropped, wit disappearing around 1200, approximately a century before git. As for nouns, Old English formed plurals by a variety of endings (-as, -u, -ru, -a, -an), or a zero morpheme, or by changing a vowel. The universal inflection -es was yet another innovation spreading from the North of England to the more conservative South and West. Despite being confined in Old English only to strong (irregular) masculine and neuter nominatives and accusatives, it gradually drove out other forms, notably the much more widespread -en plural of weak and feminine strong nouns. Baugh and Cable (1951) observe that the -en ending was the favourite form in the South until the thirteenth century, and was overgeneralised to nouns that had belonged to different declensions: Barber (1993) quotes the example of OE deoflas and englas becoming ME devlen and englen. Two centuries later, the plural in -en had virtually fallen out of use, with the exception of a few nouns, nowadays represented only by children, brethren and oxen. Similarly to nouns, ME verbs too underwent regularisation. Through the common phenomenon of analogy, verbs borrowed from French were modelled on the weak conjugation , and in the absence of a standard, the regularisation process of native strong verbs - which had already started in Old English - gained momentum as well. According to Baugh and Cable's calculations, while only ten strong verbs had turned into weak ones in the OE period, in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth century no less than forty-four strong verbs following different patterns of conjugation were adapted to the more familiar and consistent regular one. Examples of these are climb, help and walk. As commonly happens with gradual changes, the new forms were used alongside the traditional ones for some time before dying out . The ME verbal system presents yet another example of the tendency away from inflectional and towards analytic devices: while verb inflections were drastically reduced, more frequent use was made of the full tense system, including perfect and continuous tenses, both rarely used in Old English. According to Lightfoot (1979), true auxiliaries only developed in the sixteenth century, and Fischer (1992) observes that in Old English the function of perfect tenses was not yet clearly defined as it is nowadays. Moreover, the OE use of both auxiliaries habban and beon for the perfect created ambiguities, since beon - together with weor?an - was used for the passive as well (Crystal, 1995). This situation was resolved during Middle English through the spread of have at the expense of be in perfect constructions (although the latter lingered on with verbs of motion and change of state), whereas be came to be restricted to the passive (completely displacing weor?an) and progressive. As for progressive tenses, Barber (1993) underlines that the ME ones, which passed into Modern English, probably did not evolve from Old English, despite being used in much the same way. Rather, "it is more likely that they arose from ME sentences like he was areading, where areading has developed from on reading [.]. Originally this reading was not part of the verb, but was a noun" (p. 163). With regard to the passive, Middle English saw its range of possible uses expand to cover not only the passivisation of direct objects - as was the case in Old English - but also, as Fischer points out, indirect objects (as in I was unjustly marked down for splitting an infinitive) and prepositional objects (my split infinitive was sneered at). Fischer hypothesises that the reasons behind the spread of passive constructions may include "the gradual loss of the Old English active construction with indefinite man [...] and the change in word order" (p. 384). In addition to the increased use and specialisation of the auxiliaries be and have, and the introduction of do in questions and negation, the modal verbs - which in Old English were full verbs - took on their modern functions. Thus, for example, shall and will went from their primary connotation of obligation and desire to marking the future tense. Modals (such as should, would, may, might) also took on the function of expressing possibility and necessity when, due to the decay of inflections, the subjunctive fell out of use. Once again, Middle English proves to be a period of fast transition, experimentation and overlapping of different forms: in the phase between the OE fully developed subjunctive mood to the modern usage of modals, "the original subjunctive function was sometimes taken over by Verb + Tense, while the formula do + Tense + Verb was used with the function of the original indicative - to assert the truth of the proposition" (Closs Traugott 1972, p. 149). A further ME development affecting verbal inflections was the loss of the infinitive ending -(i)an and the subsequent introduction of the particle to. Crystal (1995) explains that this was originally the preposition to, used to indicate purpose (as in in order to) and later grammaticalised as the infinitive marker. An alternative ME construction for to is still in use in some regional dialects. Some modern nonstandard varieties of English also retain another feature characteristic of Early Middle English: the use of multiple negatives for emphasis. The OE negation was formed with the particle ne, which could be followed by more negatives for emphatic purposes. One of these negative particles was na?t, a contraction of nawiht, "not at all". In Middle English, na?t lost its emphatic quality (Closs Traugott, 1972) and came to be routinely used in the ME standard negation ne. na?t. Moreover, double and even triple negatives were commonly used, as in the Cuckoo Song verse ne swik ?u nauer nu, "don't never stop now". By the late fourteenth century, however, English had dropped the (usually unstressed) first particle ne, leaving only the more perceptible naht, which in time became present-day not. (Freeborn, 1992). As a consequence, double negation grew rarer, and was finally proscribed as incorrect English under the influence of eighteenth-century prescri ptivists, who decreed, following mathematical logic, that a sequence of two negatives would result in a positive (Barber, 1993). Another indication of the trend of Middle English towards analytical syntax is visible in the appearance, in the thirteenth century, of the periphrastic comparative and superlative adjectives formed with more and most. In Old English, these were obtained respectively by adding -ra and -ost to the stems (Mitchell and Robinson, 1964), which then became -re and -est when the vowels of inflectional endings weakened (-re then turned into -er with the loss of final vowels). Middle English saw the rise of the new periphrastic comparison of adjectives, probably reinforced by Latin and French. During the whole period double comparatives and superlatives are found as well, such as more blyther and most beautifullest. As this last word suggests, moreover, it was only in the seventeenth century that a distinction in usage was made between mono- and disyllabic adjectives, and those with more than two syllables (Baugh and Cable, 1951). The grammatical changes I have discussed are only the most prominent ones which occurred in the course of Middle English. Other innovations include the introduction of the indefinite pronoun one, the construction (for) NP to V (as in it is time for me to wrap up this essay), the dummy pronoun it, the use of the historical present in narratives, and more still. Together with the upheavals in vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling, these made of Middle English a fertile hotbed of linguistic developments which Baugh and Cable (1951) define as "changes more extensive and fundamental than those that have taken place at any time before or since." (p. 158).

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