Content. Introduction chapter. I. The Middle English and the Modern English Periods

Middle English
New English
[ei] wey	[ei] make
[i:] time	[i:] see
[e:] seen	[i:] sea
[ai] sayde	[ai] time
[ou] howe	[ou] go
[u:] hous	[u:] moon
[au] drawen	[au] house

At the same time the essence of this phonetic change consists in the fact that the distribution of the long vowels became different: the sound [i:] occurs in the New English word see which was pronounced as [se:] in Middle English, but the same sound does not occur in the new English word time which was pronounced as [ti:m ] in Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift was the most profound and comprehensive change in the history of English vowels. Every long vowel, as well as some diphthongs, was "shifted", and the pronunciation of all the words with these sounds was altered. The problem of the Great Vowel Shift has attracted the attention of many linguists and still remains unsolved.

2.2. Evloution of the grammatical system from the 11^th to 18^th centuries
In the course of ME and 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.
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 and 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 and 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 ȝe-, which was commonly used in OE to mark Participle II, went out of use in Late ME (instances of Participle II with the prefix y- (from OE ȝe-) are still found in Chaucer's time (see Line 8 of the extract from the CANTERBURY TALES).