Lecture Morphology of Roman-German languages Plan

Lecture 3. Morphology of Roman-German languages

Plan:

1. 
   Causes of changes in English morphology.
   
2. 
   Laws in morphology
   

Key words and expressions: loss, morphology, flexion, ending, drop, plural, singular,

Because of the loss of final m n, and the weakening of unstressed a o u e to [], many OE inflections became indistinguishable in early ME and dropped in late ME. The frequency of subject and object NP forms established the nominative/accusative plural form (and the -es inflection for nouns in general) throughout the plural, and the nominative/accusative singular (sometimes with analogical -e from the dative) throughout the singular—except that the genitive in -s was maintained. Thus the ME paradigm for a noun like fox came to be essentially what it is in NE: sg. fox, possessive foxes (now fox's), and plural foxes.

In other paradigms, the reduction of inflectional distinctions was even greater. The dor class was reduced to three forms (deer, deeres, deere), while lr was reduced to two (loor, loore); these distinctions were further leveled when final inflected -e vanished, by about 1500. Adjectival inflections were greatly simplified at the beginning of ME, and completely lost by the end.

ME has more or less the same verb inflections as NE, except that the 3sg. present tense ends in -(e)th (lyketh, hath), and plural present tense in -n or -en (apparently borrowed from the OE subjunctive): gon, eten, bryngen. The reduction of the verbal inflectional system brought about a marked increase of periphrastic constructions in the future and perfect; modals replaced the OE subjunctive. Thus the establishment of an auxiliary system, including perfective have and be, is in large part compensation for inflectional reductions. The historical present is a late development of ME.

2. The common features of germanic languages

Old German languages show differences in comparison with other European Lang on 3 main linguistic levels: grammatical, phonetic and lexical.

IN PHONETICS:

accent (word stress) in IE was characterized by free and musical accent (fixed & unfixed) ; in PG accent became fixed on the root syllable and dynamic, strong (силовое); characteristics of musical accent disappeared in Gmc languages

Indo-European (Non-Germanic)	Proto-Germanic
1. free stress (movable, i.e. can appear in any part of a word (root, prefix, suffix));	1. fixed stress (can’t move either in form- or word-building and is usually placed on root or prefix);
2. pitch stress (musical)	2. dynamic stress (force, breath stress)
E.g.: русский	E.g.: German	English
б`елый	`Liebe	`white
белизн`а	`lieben	`whiteness
белов`атый	`lieberhaft	`whitish
бел`ить	ge`liebt	`whitewash

The Proto-Germanic type of stress led to the formation of the following peculiarities of the Germanic languages as compared to non-Germanic Indo-European languages:

phonetic – as a result of the fixed position of the stress the unstressed syllables were becoming weaker and weaker, they got less distinct and neutral sounds (such as “schwa”) appeared;

morphological – as a result of the fact that the stress was fixed on the root and the syllables following the root were always unstressed and weak, many Germanic languages began to lose suffixes and grammatical endings (all the vocalic endings) and became ANALYTICAL LANGUAGES.

Grimm’s and Verner’s laws.