The noun. Decay of Noun Declensions in Early Middle English

The OE noun had the grammatical categories of Number and Case which were formally distinguished in an elaborate system of declensions. However, homonymous forms in the OE noun paradigms neutralised some of the grammatical oppositions; similar endings employed in different declensions - as well as the influence of some types upon other types - disrupted the grouping of nouns into morphological classes.

Increased variation of the noun forms in the late 10th c. and especially in the 11th and 12th c. testifies to impending changes and to a strong tendency toward a re-arrangement and simplification of the declensions. The number of variants of grammatical forms in the 11th and 12th c. was twice as high as in the preceding centuries. Among the variant forms there were direct descendants of OE forms with phonetically weakened endings (the so-called "historical forms") and also numerous analogical forms taken over from other parts of the same paradigms and from more influential morphological classes. The new variants of grammatical forms obliterated the distinction between the forms within the paradigms and the differences between the declensions, e.g.. Early ME fisshes and bootes, direct descendants of the OE Nom. and Acc. pl of Masc. a-stems fiscas, batas were used, as before, in the position of these cases and could also be used as variant forms of other cases Gen. and Dat. pi alongside the historical forms fisshe, hoofs. (OE Gen. pl. fisca, bāta) and fischen, booten or fisshe, boots (OE Dat. pl fiscum, batum); (NE fish, boat). As long as all these variants co-existed, it was possible to mark a form more precisely by using a variant with a fuller ending, but when some of the variants went out of use and the non-distinctive, levelled variants prevailed, many forms fell together. Thus after passing through the "variation stage" many formal oppositions were lost. The most numerous OE morphological classes of nouns were a-stems, o-stems and n-stems. Even in Late OE the endings used in these types were added by analogy to other kinds of nouns, especially if they belonged to the same gender. That is how the noun declensions tended to be re-arranged on the basis of gender.

The decline of the OE declension system lasted over three hundred years and revealed considerable dialectal differences. It started in the North of England and gradually spread southwards. The decay of inflectional endings in the Northern dialects began as early as the 10th c. and was virtually completed in the 11th; in the Midlands the process extended over the 12th c., while in the Southern dialects it lasted till the end of the 13th (in the dialect of Kent, the old inflectional forms were partly preserved even in the 14th c.).

The dialects differed not only in the chronology but also in the nature of changes. The Southern dialects rearranged and simplified the noun declensions on the basis of stem and gender distinctions. In Early ME they employed only four markers -es, -en, -e, and the root-vowel interchange plus the bare stem (the "zero "-inflection) but distinguished, with the help of these devices, several paradigms. Masc. and Neut. nouns had two declensions, weak and strong, with certain differences between the genders in the latter: Masc. nouns took the ending -es in the Nom., Acc. pl, while Neut. nouns had variant forms: Masc. fishes Neut. land/lande/landes. Most Fem. nouns belonged to the weak declension and were declined like weak Masc. and Neut. nouns. The root-stem declension, as before, had mutated vowels in some forms' and many variant forms which showed that the vowel interchange was becoming a marker of number rather than case.

In the Midland and Northern dialects the system of declension was much simpler. In fact, there was only one major type of declension and a few traces of other types. The majority of nouns took the endings of OE Masc. a-stems: -(e)s in the Gen. sg (from OE -es), -(e)s in the pi irrespective of case (from OE -as: Nom. and Acc. sg, which had extended to other cases).

A small group of nouns, former root-stems, employed a root-vowel interchange to distinguish the forms of number. Survivals of other OE declensions were rare and should be treated rather as exceptions than as separate paradigms. Thus several former Neut. a-stems descending from long-stemmed nouns could build their plurals with or without the ending -(e)s; sg hors — pl hors or horses, some nouns retained weak forms with the ending -en alongside new forms in -es; some former Fem. nouns and some names of relations occur in the Gen. case without -(e)s like OE Fem. nouns, e. g. my fader soule, 'my father's soul'; In hope to standen in his lady grace 'In the hope of standing in his lady's grace' (Chaucer) though the latter can be regarded as a set phrase.

In Late ME, when the Southern traits were replaced by Central and Northern traits in the dialect of London, this pattern of noun declensions prevailed in literary English. The declension of nouns in the age of Chaucer, in its main features, was the same as in ME. The simplification of noun morphology was on the whole completed. Most nouns distinguished two forms: the basic form (with the "zero" ending) and the form in -(e)s. The nouns originally descending from other types of declensions for the most part had joined this major type, which had developed from Masc. a-stems.

Simplification of noun morphology affected the grammatical categories of the noun in different ways and to a varying degree. The OE Gender, being a classifying feature (and not a grammatical category proper) disappeared together with other distinctive features of the noun declensions. (Division into genders played a certain role in the decay of the OE declension system: in Late OE and Early ME nouns were grouped into classes or types of declension according to gender instead of stems.

In the 11th and 12th c. the gender of nouns was deprived of its main formal support the weakened and leveled 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 smoothly and naturally superseded by a semantic division into inanimate and animate nouns, with a further subdivision of the latter into males and females.

In Chaucer's time gender is a lexical category, like in ME: nouns are referred to as "he" and "she" if they denote human beings, e. g She wolde wepe, if that she saw a mous. Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde (Chaucer) "She" points here to a woman while "it" replaces the noun mous, which in OE was Fem. ('She would weep, if she saw a mouse caught in a trap, if it was dead or it bled.') (Sh.)

The grammatical category of Case was preserved but underwent profound changes in Early ME. The number of cases in the noun paradigm was reduced from four (distinguished in OE) to two in Late ME. The syncretism of cases was a slow process which went on step by step. As shown above even in OE the forms of the Nom. and Ace. were not distinguished in the pi, and in some classes they coincided also in the sg. In Early ME they fell together in both numbers.

In the strong declension the Dat. was sometimes marked by -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 three OE cases, Nom., Acc. and Dat. fell together. Henceforth they can be called the 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 pi. 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 Comm. case pi or, perhaps, from the Gen. sg. This ending was generalised in the Northern dialects and in the Midlands (a survival of the OE Gen. pl form in -ena, ME -en(e), was used in Early ME only in the Southern districts). The formal distinction between cases in the pi 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 and men, added the marker of the Gen. case -es to these forms: oxenes, mennes. In the 17th and 18th c. a new graphic marker of the Gen. case came into use: the apostrophe e. g. man's, children's: this device could be 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 meanings 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., 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 means it could express various meanings formerly belonging to different cases. The following passages taken from three translations of the Bible give a general idea of the transition; they show how the OE Gen. Dat. cases were replaced in ME, Early NE by prepositional phrases with the noun in the Comm. case. OE translation of the Gospels (10th c.) Eadige synd þa gastlican þearfan, forþam hyra ys heofena rice. (Gen.) Wyclifs translation (late 14th c. Blessed be the pore in spirit, for the kingdom in heuenes is heren. King James' Bible (17th c. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The replacement of the Dat. by prepositional phrases had been well prepared by its wide use in OE as a case commonly governed by prepositions.

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, e. g. He knew the tavernes well in every town. For catel hadde they ynogh and rente (Chaucer) ('He knew well the taverns in every town for they had enough wealth and income'.)

The history of the Gen. case requires special consideration. Though it survived as a distinct form, its use became more limited: unlike OE 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 practice to express genitival relations by the of-phrase goes back to OE. It is not uncommon in Ælfric's writings (10th c). but its regular use instead of the inflectional Gen. does not become established until the 12th c. The use of the of-phrase grew rapidly in the 13th and 14th c. In some texts there appears a certain differentiation between the synonyms: the inflectional Gen. is preferred with animate nouns, while the of-phrase is more widely used with inanimate ones. Usage varies, as can be seen from the following examples from Chaucer: Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre ('He was very worthy in his lord's campaigns')

He had maad ful many a mariage of yonge wommen ('He made many marriages of young women') And specially, from every shires ende, Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende.

('And especially from the end of every shire of England they went to Canterbury')

Various theories have been advanced to account for the restricted use of the Gen. case, particularly for the preference of the inflectional Gen. with "personal" nouns. It has been suggested that the tendency to use the inflectional Gen. with names of persons is a continuation of an old tradition pertaining to word order. It has been noticed that the original distinction between the use of the Gen. with different kind of nouns was not in form but in position. The Gen. of "personal" nouns was placed before the governing noun, while the Gen. of other nouns was placed after it. The post-positive Gen. was later replaced by the of-phrase with the result that the of-phrase came to be preferred with inanimate nouns and the inflectional Gen. with personal (animate) ones. Another theory attributes the wider use of the inflectional Gen. with animate nouns to the influence of a specific possessive construction containing a possessive pronoun: the painter'ys name, where 'ys is regarded as a shortened form of his "the painter his name". It is assumed that the frequent use of these phrases may have reinforced the inflectional Gen., which could take the ending -is, -ys alongside -es and thus resembled the phrase with the pronoun his, in which the initial [h] could be dropped.

It may be added that the semantic differentiation between the prepositional phrase and the s'-Gen. became more precise in the New period, each acquiring its own set of meanings, with only a few overlapping spheres. (It has been noticed, that in present-day English the frequency of the 's-Gen. is growing again at the expense of the of-phrase.)

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. The pl forms in ME show obvious traces of numerous OE noun declensions. Some of these traces have survived in later periods. 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 pi 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 following examples show the development of the ME pl inflection -es in Early NE under different phonetic conditions.

The ME pl ending -en, used as a variant marker with some nouns (and as the main marker in the weak declension in the Southern dialects) lost its former productivity, so that in Standard ME it is found only in oxen, brethern, and children. (The two latter words originally did not belong to the weak declension: OE broðor, a-stem, built its plural by means of a root-vowel interchange; OE cild, took the ending -ru: cild—cildru; -en was added to the old forms of the pl in ME; both words have two markers of the pl.). The small group of ME nouns with homonymous forms of number (ME deer, hors, thing,) has been further reduced to three "exceptions" in ME: deer, sheep and swine. The group of former root-stems has survived only as exceptions: man, tooth and the like. Not all irregular forms in ME are traces of OE declensions; forms like data, nuclei, antennae have come from other languages together with the borrowed words.

It follows that the majority of English nouns have preserved and even reinforced the formal distinction of Number in the Comm. case. Meanwhile they have practically lost these distinctions in the Gen. case, for Gen. has a distinct form in the pi. only with nouns whose pl ending is not -es.

Despite the regular neutralisation of number distinctions in the Gen, case we can say that differentiation of Number in nouns has become More explicit and more precise. The functional load and the frequency of occurrence of the Comm. case are certainly much higher than those of the Gen.; therefore the regular formal distinction of Number in the Comm. case is more important than its neutralisation in the Gen. case.