The pronoun. Personal and Possessive Pronouns

Since personal pronouns are noun-pronouns, it might have been expected that their evolution would repeat the evolution of nouns-in reality it was in many respects different. The development of the same grammatical categories in nouns and pronouns was not alike. It differed in the rate and extent of changes, in the dates and geographical directions, though the morphology of pronouns, like the morphology of nouns, was simplified.

In Early ME the OE Fern. pronoun of the 3rd p. sg heo (related to all the other pronouns of the 3rd p. he, hit, hie} was replaced by a group of variants he, ho, see, sho, she: one of them she finally prevailed over the others. The new Fern. pronoun. Late ME she, is believed to have developed from the OE demonstrative pronoun of the Fern. gender seo (OE se, seo, ðæt, NE that). It was first recorded in the North Eastern regions and gradually extended to other areas.

The replacement of OE heo by ME she is a good illustration of the mechanism of linguistic change and of the interaction of intra- and extra linguistic factors. Increased dialectal divergence in Early ME supplied 'the "raw material" for the change in the shape of co-existing variants or parallels. Out of these variants the language preserved the unambiguous form she, probably to avoid an homonymy clash, since the descendant of OE heo ME he coincided with the Masc. pronoun he. The need to discriminate between the two pronouns was an internal factor which determined the selection. The choice could also be favored by external historical conditions, for in later ME many Northern and East Midland features were incorporated in the London dialect, which became the basis of literary English. It should be noted, however, that the replacement was not complete, as the other forms of OE heo were preserved: hire/her, used in ME as the Obj. case and as a Poss. pronoun is a form of OE heo but not of its new substitute she; hers was derived from the form hire/her.

About the same time in the course of ME another important lexical replacement took place: the OE pronoun of the 3rd p. pl hie was replaced by the Scand. loan-word they [ðei]. Like the pronoun she, it came from the North-Eastern areas and was adopted by the mixed London dialect. This time the replacement was more complete: they ousted the Nom. case, OE hie, while them and their (corning from the same Scand. loan) replaced the oblique case forms: OE hem and heora. The two sets of forms coming from they and hie occur side by side in Late ME texts, e. g.: That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke. ('Who has helped them when they were sick.') It is noteworthy that these two replacements broke up the genetic ties between the pronouns of the 3rd p.: in OE they were all obvious derivatives of one pronominal root with the initial [h]: he, heo, hit, hie. The Late ME (as well as the NE) pronouns of the 3rd p. are separate words with no genetic ties whatever: he, she, it, they (it is a direct descendant of OE hit with [h] lost).

One more replacement was made in the set of personal pronouns at a later date in the 17th or 18th c. Beginning with the 15th c. the pi forms of the 2nd p. ye, you, your were applied more and more generally to individuals. In Shakespeare's time the pi. forms of the 2nd p. were widely used as equivalents of thou, thee, thine. Later thou became obsolete in Standard English. (Nowadays thou is found only in poetry, in religious discourse and in some dialects.) Cf. the free interchange of you and thou in Shakespeare's sonnets. But if thou live, remember'd not to be. Die single, and thine image dies with thee. Or I shall live your epitaph to make. Or you survive when I in earth am rotten.

Personal and Possessive Pronouns in ME and Early NE

ME texts contain instances where the use of articles and other noun determiners does not correspond to modern rules, e. g. For hym was levere have at his beddes heed twenty bookes clad in blak or reed... / Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie. 'For he would rather have at the head of his bed twenty books bound in black or red than rich robes, or a fiddle, or a gay psaltery' (a musical instrument); Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre 'yet he had but little gold in the coffer (or: in his coffer)'.

It is believed that the growth of articles in Early ME was caused, or favored, by several internal linguistic factors. The development of the definite article is usually connected with the changes in the declension of adjectives, namely with the loss of distinctions between the strong and weak forms. Originally the weak forms of adjectives had a certain demonstrative meaning resembling that of the modern definite article. These forms were commonly used together with the demonstrative pronouns se, seo, ðæt. In contrast to weak forms, the strong forms of adjectives conveyed the meaning of "indefiniteness" which was later transferred to an, a numeral and indefinite pronoun. In case the nouns were used without adjectives or the weak and strong forms coincided, the form-words an and ðæt turned out to be the only means of expressing these meanings. The decay of adjective declensions speeded up their transition into articles. Another factor which may account for the more regular use of articles was the changing function of the word order. Relative freedom in the position of words in the OE sentence made it possible to use word order for communicative purposes, e. g. to present a new thing or to refer to a familiar thing already known to the listener. After the loss of inflections, the word order assumed a grammatical function, it showed the grammatical relations between words in the sentence; now the parts of the sentence, e. g. the subject or the objects, had their own fixed places. The communicative functions passed to the articles and their use became more regular. The growth of the articles is thus connected both with the changes in syntax and in morphology.