Theme: The main features of the Noun and the Adjectives in the Middle English period Contents: Introduction

Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde. (Chaucer)
The grammatical category of Case was preserved but underwent profound changes in Early Middle English. The syncretism of cases was a slow process which went on step by step. In Old English the forms of the Nominative And Accusative were not distinguished in the plural and in some classes they coincided also in the sg. In Early Middle English they fell together in both numbers. In the strong declension the Dative 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 Old English cases, Nominative, Accusative and Dative fell together. Only the Genitive case was kept separate from the other forms, with more explicit formal distinctions in the singular than in the plural. In the 14^th c. the ending –es of the Genitive singular 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 plural the Genitive case had no special marker. The formal distinction between cases in the plural 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 Genitive case –es to these forms: oxenes, mennes. In the 17^th and 18^th c. a new graphic marker of the Genitive 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:

Old English	Early Middle English	Late Middle English and Modern English
Nominative Accusative	Common Dative	Common
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 Common case, which resulted from the fusion of three Old English cases assumed all the functions of the former Nominative, Accusative and Dative, and also some functions of the Genitive. ¹²

The Middle English Common 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 history of the Genitive case requires special consideration. Though it survived as a distinct form, its use became more limited: unlike Old English it could not be employed in the function of an object to a verb or to an adjective. In Middle English the Genitive 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 Old English. ¹³
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 Middle English 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. ¹⁴
In Late Middle English the ending –es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the plural. In Early New English 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 Middle English or employed –es as one of the variant endings. The plural ending –es (as well as the ending –es of the Genitive case) underwent several phonetic changes: the voicing of fricatives and the loss of unstressed vowels in final syllables.
The Middle English plural ending –en, used as a variant marker with some nouns lost its former productivity, so that in Standard Modern English it is found only in oxen, brethren, and children. The small group of Middle English nouns with homonymous forms of number (Middle English: deer, hors, thing) has been further reduced to 3 “exceptions” in Modern English: deer, sheep and swine. The group of former root-stems has survived only as exceptions: man, tooth and so on. It follows that the majority of English nouns have preserved and even reinforced the formal distinction of Number in the Common case. Meanwhile they have practically lost these distinctions in the Genitive case, for Genitive has a distinct form in the pl only with nouns whose pl ending is not –es. ¹⁵