1. ENGLISH LANGUAGE – 2° YEAR A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Annalisa Federici, Ph.D. Textbook: J. Culpeper, History of English, Routledge 1997. (unit 9)

2. GRAMMAR: VERBS As with nouns, verbs have experienced a dramatic loss of inflections, which has been counterbalanced by a rise in the use of auxiliary verbs, subject pronouns, stricter word order. In OE, verb inflections signalled person (masculine, feminine, neuter) number (singular, plural) tense (present, past) and mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative). In OE, verbs used to signal grammatical functions through different inflections for each person of the present and the past tense. Today the only remaining inflection for person is the -s of the third person singular, and for tense the -ed of regular verbs.

3. GRAMMAR: VERBS In OE, there was no third person singular -s, but instead an -eð, later replaced by -eth. In ME (Midlands Dialect) we have both forms. The reason why the -s inflection appeared can be found in the influence of the Scandinavian languages. The -s inflection gradually spread from North to South and, by the Early Modern period, it replaced the -eth inflection which came to be seen as archaic (it survived through the eighteenth century only in the forms hath and doth).

4. GRAMMAR: VERBS As for tense, English, in common with other Germanic languages, divides verbs into two groups: WEAK VERBS (which add -t or -d to the root to form the past or past participle) and STRONG VERBS (which do not add an inflectional ending, but change the vowel of their base form).

5. GRAMMAR: VERBS In OE, all strong-verb past participles originally had the inflection -en at the end and the prefix ge- at the beginning (e.g. OE past participle of ride is geriden). Such old forms have survived as adjectives before nouns (e.g. drunken vs. drunk, molten vs. melted, stricken vs. struck, shrunken vs. shrunk). The most important change over time is the conversion of the minority of strong verbs to the weak pattern, with both forms for the same verb at various points in time. Today, all new coinages follow the weak pattern.

6. GRAMMAR: VERBS Auxiliary verbs in present-day English can be said to perform an analogous function to inflectional endings in OE. As a general tendency, the further you go back in time, the less likely you are to find the use of auxiliary verbs. The development of the auxiliary verb do is an interesting example:  Today it can be used as a main verb exactly as in OE (where it probably meant “to put something somewhere”).  Today it is used as an auxiliary in negatives, in questions and for emphasis.

7. GRAMMAR: VERBS  It only began to be used as a common, empty (meaningless) auxiliary verb in the ME period (around 1400).  In OE, questions were formed by reversal of order between subject and verb (a method still used in Early Modern English, together with auxiliaries), while negatives were formed by adding ne before the verb and not after it. In ME ne ceased to be used, leaving just not, and in Early Modern English not coexisted with do/did.

8. GRAMMAR: VERBS Why has English lost inflectional endings over time? 1.English underwent a phonological change leading to a grammatical change: the inflections at the end of many words ceased to be stressed and started to disappear.

9. GRAMMAR: VERBS 2.English has experienced contact with several other languages (Celtic, Scandinavian, French), which may have enhanced regularisation in order to make it easier for people to communicate. In particular, many English and Scandinavian words differed chiefly in inflectional endings, while the body of the word was nearly the same. In the mixed population of the Danelaw, for instance, such inflections may have prevented understanding, tending gradually to become obscure and finally disappear. 3.Outside Britain, English has more recently come into contact with many languages, creating further pressure to simplify the inflectional system.