The thesis of the lecture
№ 8
Aim: - to activate students’ to brainstorm on the questions
- to provide a summary of key items
- to link the students experience with learning
- to make learning two-way process
Activity descriptions:
- Presentation to the grammatical categories of the English noun.
- Presentation to the a-stem, n-stem, root-stem declensions and its traces in ModE.
- To speak about the evolution of the noun in ME and ModE.
Lists of literature:
1. Аракин В.Д. Очерки по истории английского языка.- М., 1955.
2. Залесская Л.Д, Матвеева Д.А Пособие по истории английского языка.–
М., Высшая школа, 1984..
4.Мортон А. История Англии, М., 1955.
5. Расторгуева Т.А.История английского языка, В 2-х частях- М., 1972.
6. Смирницкий А.И. Хрестоматия по истории английского языка. - М.,1953.
7. Смирницкий А.И. Древнеанглийский язык, М., 1958.
8. Иванова И.П., Чахоян Л.П. История английского языка. - М., 1976.
9. Ильиш Б.А. История английского языка,. -Л.,1973.
10. Ayapova T.T. History of English (электрон.версия) КазУМО иМЯ 2002 г.
11. Baugh A.C., Cable T. A history of the English language. London: Routledge, 1978.
12.Blake N.F. A history of the English language. Basingtoke: McMillion, 1996.
13.Smith J. J. Essentials of Early English. New York. Routledge, 1999.
14. Hughes A.Trudgill P, English Accents and Dialects. Oxford University Press, 1966
15. Hughes A.A History of English words. Oxford University Press, 1996.
16. McMannon A..Lexical Phonolоgy and the History of English Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,2000.
17. Robinson D. From Old English to Standard, Oxford, 1977.
file: // A: // ling. Dictionaries.htm.
18. www.google.com.
19. www.yahoo.com
20. www.rambler.com
The most peculiar feature of Old English nouns was their division into several types of declensions, known as "stems".
The names a-stem, o-stem, etc., have purely historical significance and merely point to the origin of the different paradigms, as the stem-suffixes cannot be distinguished in the nouns of written Old English.
The division of nouns into declensions was as follows: the declensions of nouns with vocalic stems known as the strong declensions comprised a -stems o- stems u- stems and i- stems, with some variants within the two former groups (ja - and wa -stems, jō - and wō-stems). The nouns whose stems originally ended in consоnants are divided into n -stems (the weak declension) and stems ending in other consonants: r -stems, nd -stems. Within the minor consonantal declensions, it is.important to distinguish a group of nouns called "root-stems" which had never had any stem-suffix and whose root was thus equal to the stem.
The division into stems did not coincide with the division into genders: some stems were confined to one or two genders only; thus a- stems were only Masculine and Neuter; O-stems were always Feminine; others included nouns of any gender.
The only inflections retained in the noun were, as we have seen above, those marking the plural and the possessive singular. In the former the s -plural had become so generalized that except for a few nouns like sheep and swine with unchanged plurals and a few others like mice and feet with mutated vowels we are scarcely conscious of any other forms. In the sixteenth century, however, there are certain survivals of the old weak plural in -n.
Most of these had given way before the usual s -forms: fon (foes), kneen (knees), fleen (fleas). But beside the more modern forms Shakespeare occasionally has eyen (eyes), shoon (shoes), and kine, while the plural hosen is occasionally found in other writers. Today, except for the poetical kine and mixed plurals like children and brethren, the only plural of this type in general use is oxen.
An interesting peculiarity of this period, and indeed later, is the his— genitive. In Middle English the -es of the genitive, being unaccented, was frequently written and pronounced -is, -ys. The ending was thus often identical with the pronoun his, which commonly lost its h when unstressed. Thus there was no difference in pronunciation between stonis and ston is (his), and as early as the thirteenth century l the ending was sometimes written separately as though the possessive case were a contraction of a noun and the pronoun his. This notion was long prevalent and Shakespeare writes 'Gainst the count his galleys I did some service and In characters as red as Mars his heart. Until well into the eighteenth century people were troubled by the illogical consequences of this usage 1; Dr. Johnson points out that one can hardly believe that the possessive ending is a contraction of his in such expressions as a woman's beauty or a virgin's delicacy. He, himself, seems to have been aware that its true source was the Old English genitive, but the error has left its trace in the apostrophe which we still retain as a graphic convenience to mark the possessive.
One other construction affecting the noun becomes established during this period, the group possessive: the Duke of Gloucester s niece, the King of England's nose, somebody else's hat. The construction is perhaps illogical, since even a king may be considered to have some rights in his nose, and the earlier construction was the Duke's niece of Gloucester, etc. But the expressions Duke of Gloucester, King of England, and the like, occurred so commonly as a unit that in the fifteenth century we begin to get the sign of the possessive added to the group. Instances are not common before the sixteenth century and the construction may be thought of properly as belonging to the modern period. Nowadays we may say the writer of the book's ambition or the chief actor in the play's illness.
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 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. and Dat. cases were replaced in ME and Early NE by prepositional phrases with the noun in the Comm. case.