DANCEST 805 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Genitive Case, Bound And Unbound Morphemes, Modern English
Document Summary
The old english paradigm: 4 cases, 2 numbers, 3 genders, type of declension. Old english is a syntactic language using inflexion to express syntactic relationships/ grammatical information within a sentence. Inflexion: addition of morphemes to a root word which assigns grammatical properties to that word. Case syncretism: a single inflected form corresponds to two or more case functions. Only the marking of the genitive and the plural is left. > across time case syncretism became almost absolute. Case syncretism is mainly due to two processes : heavy stress on the root syllable, reduction of final vowels to /i/ or / , merger of /m/ and /n/ > endings lost their distinctive forms: confusion, old english and old norse were mutually understandable. The old english and old norse paradigms were very similar and the two inflectional paradigms got confused. The middle english paradigm: 2 cases, 2 numbers.
