Grammatical Changes in Middle English

Phonological change had extreme consequences on the grammar of English.

As we have seen Old English was a highly inflected language. These inflections appeared at the end of words and were
unstressed. Because the inflectional endings showed the relationships between words in a sentence, the word order of
Old English was fairly free.

As a consequence of the loss of inflectional endings, grammatical relationships began to be marked through word
order and the use of preposition.

English changed from being a synthetic language to become an analytic language.

the loss of inflections

loss of grammatical gender

loss of case system

less freedom in word order

greater use of prepositions

Syntax

Word order became fixed SVO, even in subordinate clauses. It had to be fixed, because case morphology wasn’t able
to guarantee right thematic interpretation for NPs.

Prepositions used in lieu of case morphology.

Development of progressive construction: be on working > be aworking > be working.

The suffix was a nominalisation suffix in OE and into ME. Progressive could have a passive meaning until the 19th
century:

the road is building (=being built).

English starts to develop condition that all sentences have a subject, so subjectless impersonals like the following
become rare:

And happyd so, they coomen in a toun

Pronunciation changes:

Loss of initial h in a cluster (hleapan - to leap; hnutu - hut)

[w] lost between consonant and back vowel (w is silent in two, sword, answer)

[č] lost in unstressed syllable (ič - I)

[v] lost in middle of words (heofod - head; hæfde - had)

Loss of final -n in possessive pronouns (min fæder - mi fæder) and the addition of -n to some words beginning with a
vowel (a napron - an apron, a nuncle - an uncle)

Voiced fricatives became phonemic with their voiceless counterparts

[ž] phoneme was borrowed from French as the voiced counterpart for [š]

Front rounded vowels merged with their unrounded counterparts

Vowel length became predictable (lost phonemic status); an open syllable with no consonant following it contained a
long vowel, while a closed syllable with at least one consonant following it contained a short vowel.

Because English spelling was becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Great Vowel Shift is
responsible for many of the peculiarities of English spelling.

GVS

I. The Great Vowel Shift signals the single most important change from Middle to Modern English, and it separates
English from other European languages.

A. Only six vowels were affected. These are long, stressed monophthongs—that is, vowels in stressed positions in the
word that were held long in pronunciation and that had a pure sound (i.e., were not made up of groups of sounds).

B. The GVS was a systemic shift: that is, it was a change in a system of pronunciation, not a change in individual
sounds.

C. The GVS can be described in terms of articulatory phonetics:

1. Front vowels were raised and fronted.

2. Back vowels were raised and retraced.

3. High vowels were made into diphthongs

D. Here is one scholarly reconstruction of the order of the shift and perhaps how it happened:

1. The high front vowels represented by the letters i and u in ME became diphthongs: that is, they became pronounced
differently, each as a cluster of two sounds. This change took time: In early Modern English of the sixteenth century,
words like mice and mouse (in ME, pronounced “mees” and “moose”) would have been pronounced “moice” and
“mohuse.” By the end of the seventeenth century, they were pronounced “mah-ees” and “mah-oose” —very close to
our own pronunciations, which are diphthongs.

2. The mid vowels, in ME written as e and o, were raised. Thus ME feet, pronounced “fate,” came to be pronounced as
Mod English “feet.” ME do, pronounced “dough,” came to be pronounced as Mod English “do.”

3. The low back vowel written in ME as a rose to fill the place left by the older ME e. Thus, a word like name,
pronounced in ME as “nahme,” became pronounced “naim.”

4. Finally, the long, open o (pronounced like “aw”) was raised to the long o. Thus, the ME word so, pronounced like
“saw,” came to be pronounced “so.”

II. More than one explanation exists for the GVS.

A. One explanation is that dialects in England were in contact in new ways.

1. Migrations from the north and the Midlands into London brought speakers into contact.

2. This mix of dialects created social pressures to develop or select a set of pronunciations that would have new social
status or prestige.

3. The sounds that were chosen or developed appear, in retrospect, as the sounds of the GVS.

III. We can chart the GVS in writing.

A. Alexander Pope, writing in the eighteenth century, reveals that the GVS still hasn’t completely run its course.
B. But there is much early written evidence for the GVS. There survives a large body of letters from the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, mostly from family correspondence.

1. Here we see somewhat educated people writing to each other.

2. Their spelling forms were not learned in Chancery, but rather reflected their speech habits.

3. They used older, ME spelling to record new sounds in their speech resulting from the GVS.

IV. The impact of the GVS on speech and writing was substantial.

A. We need to understand the GVS in tandem with the rise in the standard forms of written English being developed in
Chancery and used by Caxton and his successors in print.

B. What we see is a growing gap between writing and speech.

1. In educated and official writing, spelling was old-fashioned: it was, in effect, etymological. It did not reflect the
newer sounds of speech in the GVS (nor did it reflect several other minor sound changes also going on the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries).

2. An added effect of this growing separation was a change in how punctuation was used. In the Middle Ages,
punctuation was, in essence, ear punctuation: It signals breaks in reading aloud. By Caxton’s time, punctuation was
moving toward eye-punctuation, which signals syntactic or clausal units of a sentence.

C. The GVS took a long time to work through.

1. There were many variations and intermediary stages in the shift.

2. For a handful of words, like steak and great, the GVS did not even apply.