Lecture 14-15 Grammatical Changes

LECTURE 14-15
Grammatical Changes.
Problems for discussion.

1. 
   Grammatical Changes
   
2. 
   Development of the Vocabulary.
   
3. 
   Contemprory Dialects
   

Phrases. MnE is characterized by further growth of the pattern "substantive +substantive", the first item acting as attribute and indicating some feature of the thing denoted by the second item. Among the first components of such phrases we find substantives of very different meanings, for example, your ryestraw hats midnight mushrooms, midnight hags.
Alongside of this type the "substantive genitive + substantive" remains in use , and it can be illustrated by such examples from Shakespeare: this man's life, his nurse's tears, the people's mouths the dead man's knell, the tyrant's head, my country's love (= love for my country).
Angreement in MnE goes on decreasing. Very few cases of agreement survived. Loss of adjective inflection made agreement of adjectives with substantives impossible. Only the two pronouns this and that still agree in nuber with their head word which is quite an isolated phenomenon in MnE.
Government. Little has remained of government, too. Practically only the personal pronouns and the interrogative and relative pronoun who are gaverend when they depend on averb or a preposition their from is bound to be the objective, not the nominative case. But even here developments set in which tendency to do away with this rule is found. On the hand , the pronoun it has no distinction of cases , the pronoun yelyou tends lose distinction, and as to the other personol pronouns, difference of cases also tends to disappear . The phrase between you and I is found in Shakespeare more than once.