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. For instance, Early ME fisshes and bootes, direct descendants of the OE Nom. and Acc. pl of Masc. a-stems — fiscas, bātas — were used, as before, in the position of these cases and could also be used as variant forms of other cases — Gen. and Dat. pl — alongside the historical forms fisshe, boote (OE Gen. pl fisca, bāta) and fischen, booten or fisshe, boote (OE Dat. pl fiscum, bātum); (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 re-arranged 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., Ace. pl, while Neut. nouns had variant forms: 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 amarker 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 pl irrespective of case (from OE -as: Nom. and Ace. 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 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 Mod E. 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. Grammatical Categories of the Noun. 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 levelled 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 Mod E: 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.”) 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. In OE the forms of the Nom. and Acc. were not distinguished in the pl, 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 plural. 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 pl 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 pl 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 or 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 gradual reduction of the case-system is shown in the following chart: OE Early ME Late ME and NE Nominative } Common Accusative } Common Dative Dative Genitive Genitive Genitive
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. and Dat., and also some functions of the Gen. 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. 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. 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 pl 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: Table 1
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 Mod E it is found only in oxen, brethren, and children. The small group of ME nouns with homonymous forms of number (ME deer, hors, thing) has been further reduced to three “exceptions” in Mod E: deer, sheep and swine. The group of former root-stems has survived only as exceptions: man, tooth and the like. (It must be noted that not all irregular forms in Mod E are traces of OE declensions; forms like data, nuclei, antennae have come from other languages together with the borrowed words.)
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