Early Modern English: Morphology, Syntax, Lexis
Early Modern English: Morphology, Syntax, and Lexis
Morphology
Declensions: Only Genitive -es and -s. The apostrophe in ‘s wasn’t used to mark possession until the 18th century; it was used to mark elided e (e.g., Thron’).
- Umlaut plurals: men, feet, lice, teeth.
- Uninflected plurals: sheep, deer, swine.
- Lexical imports: phenomenon-phenomena, stimulus-stimuli, analysis-analyses.
Adjectives & Adverbs: Adjectives were indeclinable. Comparison used both periphrastic more/most and synthetic -er/-est. Double comparison (e.g., most strangest, more better) was also found, and still is in some dialects.
Pronouns: Thou (solidarity), You (power). By the 18th century, thou was an archaism. Examples: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing. The pronominal paradigm was reduced. Loss of possessives thy/thine when thou was lost. Simplification of the 2nd person plural form to you.
- Middle English: you was used for upper-class and thou for lower-class or intimacy.
- Shakespeare used thou conservatively.
- By the 18th century, thou was a religious and literary archaism.
Relative pronouns: Variety and change during the period.
Verbs
Verb inflections for 3rd person singular, present tense: Both -eth and -s were used; it was a transitional usage. -eth was replaced by -es in Standard English by 1700. -eth was retained in doth and hath. -(e)st was lost. Early Modern English plural variation: -eth, -es, -en.
Syntax
- Prepositions were replaced: betwixt became between, cross became across.
- Prepositions had weak and strong forms. Examples: i’/in, t’/to.
- Emergence of compound prepositions: in advance of, owing to, with regard to.
- Perfect tenses: Obsolete use of be as an auxiliary verb with intransitive verbs to mark perfect aspect. Be was replaced by have. No distinction between preterite and perfect in some cases.
- Clause order: SVO.
- Do-support developed as an auxiliary in questions (avoiding inversion) and negations. It was optional in Early Modern English.
Prescriptivism vs. Descriptivism
Prescriptivism focuses on rules, while descriptivism describes what is found, including change. If we review the development of English syntax in the 17th and 18th centuries, we find that most changes have no parallel in Latin:
- Completion of functional (fixed) word order (Latin had free word order).
- Regulation of syntactical uses of do.
- Semantic distinction between past and present perfect.
- Consolidation of aspectual distinctions.
Lexis
- Early Modern English saw the greatest growth in vocabulary.
- Importation of words was a common mechanism.
- In the 18th century, the pattern changed to derivation and compounding.
- In the 19th century, science relied on Latin and Greek.
- Latinate affixation.
- Morphologically unrelated pairs: father-paternal, heart-cardiac, sun-solar, moon-lunar, earth-terrestrial.
- Loss of vocabulary.
- Imports from other languages.
Word Formation
- Affixation: Very productive. Examples:
- Stratum 1: pirate/piracy, obstinate/obstinacy.
- Stratum 2: native-ness, ultimate-ly.
- Suffixes with a dual life: understand-able, charit-able.
- Compounding: anthropomorph, biology, demography, ecology, telescope.
- Conversion: The third most frequent type in Modern English. Old English lufu (noun) & lufian (verb) became the Modern English love (both noun and verb).
- Reduplication: The root is repeated exactly or with a slight change. Bric-a-brac, chit-chat, criss-cross, ding-dong, zig-zag.
- Clipping: Reduction of a word to one of its parts. Examples: Vanguard-van, Arrear-rear, Fourteen-night—fortnight.
- Blending: Words formed from parts of two or more words. Examples: dumb + confound—dumbfound, apathy + pathetic—apathetic, splash + sputter—splutter (Modern English adultescent).