语言学 grammatical change21.pptVIP

8.3.3 Grammatical change The most fundamental feature that distinguishes OE from the language of today is its grammar. 1.ModE is an analytic language while OE is a synthetic language. The major difference is that a synthetic language is one that indicates the relation of words in a sentence largely by means of inflections, but an analytic language makes extensive use of prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and depends on word order to show other relationships. 2. In OE , the order of words in a clause was more variable than that of ModE, and there were many more inflections on nouns , adjectives and verbs. 3.The grammatical changes of English such as those in number, gender, case and tense mainly took place at its morphological level , while syntactic changes such as those in word order are the consequence of the loss of rich inflections in English . The most sweeping morphological change during the evolution of English is the progressive decay of inflections . OE, ME and ModE can be called the periods of full , reduced and zero inflections respectively because ,during most of the OE period the endings of the noun, the adjective, and the verb are preserved more or less unimpaired, while during the ME period the inflections become greatly reduced, and finally by the ModE period , a large part of the original inflection system had disappeared entirely. The loss of inflections in the case system of Old English is a good example of grammatical change. Case is the grammatical feature that marks functions of the subject ,object, or possession in clause. In OE, nouns showed a four-term case contrast , for which the Latinate terms nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), genitive (possessive), and dative (indirect objective), are conventionally used, and the case-ending system can be illustrated by the following : CASE Nominative Genitive Dative accusative MODERN ENGLISH stone/stones stone’s/stones’ stone/stones Stone/stones The ME period is the b