Coordinate clauses were mostly joined by and, a conjunction of a most general meaning, which could connect statements with various semantic relations. The A-S CHRONICLES abound in successions of clauses or sentences all beginning with and, e.g.:
And þa ongeat se cyning, þæt ond he, on þa duru eode, and þa unbeanlice hine werede, oþ he on þone æþeling locude, and þa ut ræsde on hine, and hine miclum gewundode; and hie alle on þone cyning wæron feohtende, oþ þæt hie hine ofslægenne hæfdon, 'and then the king saw that, and he went to the door, and then bravely defended himself, until he saw that noble, and then out rushed on him, and wounded him severely, and they were all fighting against that king until they had him slain' (from the earliest part of the CHRONICLES A.D. 755).
Repetition of connectives at the head of each clause (termed "correlation") was common in complex sentences: þa he þær to gefaren wæs, þa eodon hie to hiora scipum 'then (when) he came there, then they went to their ship.'
Attributive clauses were joined to the principal clauses by means of various connectives, there being no special class of relative pronouns. The main connective was the indeclinable particle Re employed, either alone or together with demonstrative and personal pronouns: and him cypdon'paet hiera maezas him mid waeron, pa pe him from noldon 'and told him that their kinsmen were with him, those that did not want (to go) from him'.
The pronouns could also be used to join the clauses without the particle þe:
Hit gelamp gio þætte an hearpere wæs on þære ðiode þe Dracia hatte, sio wæs on Creca rice; se hearpere wæs swiðe ungefræglice god, ðæs nama wæs Orfeus; he hæfde an swiðe ænlic wif, sio wæs haten Eurydice 'It happened once that there was a harper among the people on the land that was called Thrace, that was in the kingdom of Crete; that harper was incredibly good; whose name (the name of that) was Orpheus; he had an excellent wife; that was called Eurydice'.
The pronoun and conjunction þæt was used to introduce object clauses and adverbial clauses, alone or with other form-words: oð ðæt 'until', ær þæm þe 'before', þæt 'so that' as in: Isaac ealdode and his eagan þystrodon, þæt he ne mihte nan þing geseon 'Then Isaac grew old and his eyes became blind so that he could not see anything'.
Some clauses are regarded as intermediate between coordinate and subordinate: they are joined asyndetically and their status is not clear: þa wæs sum consul, Boethius wæs haten 'There was then a consul, Boethius was called' (perhaps attributive: '(who) was called Boethius' or co-ordinate '(he) was called Boethius').
Lecture 5. MIDDLE ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Evolution of the grammatical system
In the course of ME, Early NE the grammatical system of the language underwent profound alteration. Since the OE period the very grammatical type of the language has changed; from what can be defined as a synthetic or inflected language, with a well developed morphology English has been transformed into a language of the "analytical type", with analytical forms and ways of word connection prevailing over synthetic ones. This does not mean, however, that the grammatical changes were rapid or sudden; nor does it imply that all grammatical features were in a state of perpetual change. Like the development of other linguistic levels, the history of English grammar was a complex evolutionary process made up of stable and changeable constituents. Some grammatical characteristics remained absolutely or relatively stable; others were subjected to more or less extensive modification.
The division of words into parts of speech has proved to be one of the most permanent characteristics of the language. Through all the periods of history English preserved the distinctions between the following parts of speech; the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral, the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection. The only new part of speech was the article which split from the pronouns in Early ME.
Between the 10th and the 16th c., that is from Late OE to Early NE the ways of building up grammatical forms underwent considerable changes. In OE all the forms which can be included into morphological paradigms were synthetic. In ME, Early NE, grammatical forms could also be built in the analytical way, with the help of auxiliary words. The proportion of synthetic forms in the language has become very small, for in the meantime many of the old synthetic forms have been lost and no new synthetic forms have developed.
In the synthetic forms of the ME, Early NE periods, few as those forms were, the means of form-building were the same as before: inflections, sound interchanges and suppletion; only prefixation, namely the prefix ge-, which was commonly used in OE to mark Participle II, went out of use in Late ME (instances of Participle II with the prefix ge- (from OE ge-) are still found in Chaucer's time. Suppletive form-building, as before, was confined to a few words, mostly surviving from OE and even earlier periods. Sound interchanges were not productive, though they did not die out: they still occurred in many verbs, some adjectives and nouns; moreover, a number of new interchanges arose in Early ME in some ups of weak verbs. Nevertheless, their application in the language, and their weight among other means was generally reduced.
Inflections - or grammatical suffixes and endings - continued to be used in all the inflected "changeable" parts of speech. It is notable, however, that as compared with the OE period they became less varied. As mentioned before the OE period of history has been described as a period of "full endings", ME - as a period of "leveled endings" and NE - as a period of "lost endings" (H. Sweet). In OE there existed a variety of distinct endings differing in consonants as well as in vowels. In ME all the vowels in the endings were reduced to the neutral [a] and many consonants were leveled under -n or dropped. The process of leveling besides phonetic weakening, implies replacement of inflections by analogy, e.g. -(e)s as a marker of pi forms of nouns displaced the endings -(e)n and -e. In the transition to NE most of the grammatical endings were dropped.
Nevertheless, these definitions of the state of inflections in the three main historical periods are not quite precise. It is known that the weakening and dropping of endings began a long time before - in Early OE and even in PG; on the other hand, some of the old grammatical endings have survived to this day.
The analytical way of form-building was a new device, which developed in Late OE and ME and came to occupy a most important place in the grammatical system. Analytical forms developed from free word groups (phrases, syntactical constructions). The first component of these phrases gradually weakened or even lost its lexical meaning and turned into a grammatical marker, while the second component retained its lexical meaning and acquired a new grammatical value in the compound form. Cf, e. g. the meaning and function of the verb to have in OE he hæfde þa 'he had them (the prisoners)', Hie him ofslægene hæfdon 'they had him killed' or, perhaps, 'they had killed him'. Hie hæfdon ofergan Eastengle 'they had overspread East Anglian territory'. In the first sentence have denotes possession, in the second, the meaning of possession is weakened, in the third, it is probably lost and does not differ from the meaning of have in the translation of the sentence into ME. The auxiliary verb have and the form of Part. II are the grammatical markers of the Perfect; the lexical meaning is conveyed by the root-morpheme of the participle. The growth of analytical grammatical forms from free word phrases belongs partly to historical morphology and partly to syntax, for they are instances of transition from the syntactical to the morphological level.
Analytical form-building was not equally productive in all the parts of speech: it has transformed the morphology of the verb but has not affected the noun.
The main direction of development for the nominal parts of speech in all the periods of history can be defined as morphological simplification, Simplifying changes began in prehistoric, PG times. They continued at a slow rate during the OE period and were intensified in Early ME. The period between c. 1000 and 1300 has been called an "age of great changes" (A.Baugh), for it witnessed one of the greatest events in the history of English grammar: the decline and transformation of the nominal morphological system. Some nominal categories were lost Gender and Case in adjectives. Gender in nouns; the number of forms distinguished in the surviving categories was reduced - cases in nouns and noun-pronouns, numbers in personal pronouns. Morphological division into types of declension practically disappeared. In Late ME the adjective lost the last vestiges of the old paradigm: the distinction of number and the distinction of weak and strong forms. Already at the time of Chaucer, and certainly by the age of Caxton the English nominal system was very much like modern, not only in its general pattern but also in minor details. The evolution of the verb system was a far more complicated process-it cannot be described in terms of one general trend. On the one hand, the decay of inflectional endings affected the verb system, though to a lesser extent than the nominal system. The simplification and leveling of forms made the verb conjugation more regular and uniform; the OE morphological classification of verbs was practically broken up. On the other hand, the paradigm of the verb grew, as new grammatical forms and distinctions came into being. The number of verbal grammatical categories increased, as did the number of forms within the categories. The verb acquired the categories of Voice, Time Correlation or Phase and Aspect. Within the category of Tense there developed a new form - the Future Tense; in the category of Mood there arose new forms of the Subjunctive. These changes involved the non-finite forms too, for the infinitive and the participle, having lost many nominal features, developed verbal features: they acquired new analytical forms and new categories like the finite verb. It is noteworthy that, unlike the changes in the nominal system, the new developments in the verb system were not limited to a short span of two or three hundred years. They extended over a long period: from Late OE till Late NE. Even in the age of Shakespeare the verb system was in some respects different from that of ME and many changes were still underway.
Other important events in the history of English grammar were the changes in syntax, which were associated with the transformation of English morphology but at the same time displayed their own specific tendencies and directions. The main changes at the syntactical level were: the rise of new syntactic patterns of the word phrase and the sentence; the growth of predicative constructions; the development of the complex sentences and of diverse means of connecting clauses. Syntactic changes are mostly observable in Late ME and in NE, in periods of literary efflorescence.
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.