Дополнительная информация

1. Аракин 2003, с. 122 – 130.

2. Иванова 2006, с. 76 – 90.

3. Расторгуева 2005, с. 190 –200, 209 – 214.

4. Смирницкий 1998, с. 52 – 94.

Section 28

Me and ne Morphological System

The ME period is marked by a great reduction in the inflectional system inherited from OE, so the language of a ______________type changed into an ___________-- one.

Henry Sweet called the OE period “the period of full endings”, ME – “the period of leveled (weakened) endings” and NE – “the period of ________ endings”.

The period between the 11^th and the 14^th cc. was referred to as “an age of great changes” (A. Baugh), for it saw one of the greatest events in the history of the English grammar – the decline and transformation (morphological simplification) of the nominal parts of speech.

The reasons of the English nominal morphological system decay

No	The reason	The explanation
1	Linguistic (phonological)
2	Extra linguistic (considered to be not convincing)	OE and OScand belonged to the ____________ group of languages and had many words with the same _________, but differing in ___________. So in _____________ bilingual regions the inflections began to lose their grammatical role.

The Noun Morphological classification of the Noun in me

In OE there were _____principal types of noun declension: strong ( _________________________), weak (__________), _______ (M, F) and _______ minor declensions. Even at that time there were many homonymous forms in the noun paradigms. Further phonetic reduction of final syllables disrupted the grouping of nouns into morphological classes.

Decay of noun declensions

declensions	OE (Sg – Pl)	EME	ME	LME – ENE
a-stem, M.	stān – stānas	stōn – stōnes	stone – stones	stone – stones
a-stem, N.	scip –scipu	ship – shipe	ship – shipes	ship – ships
n-stem	nama–namen	name – namen	name – namen	name – names
ō-stem	caru – cara	care – care	care – caren	care – cares
u-stem	sunu – suna	sone – sone	sone – sones	son – sons
root stem	bōc – bēc	book – beek	book – bookes	book –books
root stem	fōt - fēt	foot - feet	foot - feet	foot - feet

In EME ___________________ declensions had the most distinctive inflections and began to attract all the other nouns. A-stem declension became dominant in the North, _________ declension – in the South. But in the course of the ME period the Pl ending ___ spread southwards and displaced the ending ____. In LME original _________ declension gained dominance over the rest of declensions.

So we can distinguish ___ types of declension in ME: ____ major type (which developed from ________) and _____ minor types (which originated from __________________ declensions).