Problems with IPA Symbols
Because of the inability to show IPA symbols in HTML, the fonts of a webpage, much of the discussion of phonology here will be limited; look at your notes and the class handouts for help with ME sounds.

Power Point Presentations
Remember that McGowan's PowerPoint presentations are available in the Classdat folder in computer labs and on our WebCT site. Most labs store Classdat files under the S-drive. Go from S-Drive > Classdat > mcgowanta> Eng4660. If you print out the Power Points, use the three-up notes form to save paper.

Dictionaries

 

AHD: American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

Descriptive dictionary used in our course for information on contemporary English in U.S. Has computer version available in Belk Library reference section. Entries include headword (spelling and syllabification), pronunciation information with non-IPA "user friendly" symbols, list of inflected form spellings, senses arranged by main meaning (not historical like OED listings), occasional quotes, short etymological note at end of entry, and occasionally special Usage Notes or historical discussions of special words. The CD-Rom basic search function covers headwords; word hunter function provides search of full article except for phonological entry. We've learned how to interpret the etymological entries, which don't repeat a spelling if the previous reference, i.e., the more recent example, including the headword, lists the same spelling.

 

OED: Oxford English Dictionary

Comprehensive descriptive historical dictionary of English. Entries give headword (current U.K. spelling), pronunciation (usually British Received Pronunciation) in IPA symbols, form history giving variant spellings over time (numbers=teenth century [4=fourteenth century]), considerable etymological information, senses arranged chronologically, large numbers of examples of word's use over history of English. The on-line version allows word (headword only), text (the entire dictionary), quotation (only text in quotation examples), and etymology (only text in etymological entry) of the twenty volumes of the second edition and its supplements. We have a sense of how to interpret information in OED entries, to manage searches to help find different kinds of information, and to use this dictionary as a general authority for historical information.

Systems and Structures in Language

Competence

Speaker's knowledge of language rules and structures that allow her to interpret and generate utterances. We have competence in Modern English. Our knowledge is different from the competence of Middle English speakers; however, we notice that the development of the language toward more analytic structure means we share more rules with them.

Arbitrary

Term used to describe the non-universal differing ways that different languages handle representation and rules. For example, human beings do not by genetic necessity have a common term for 'dog' or a common way of forming plurality; arbitrary forms develop within separate speech communities.

Conventional

Term used to describe the accepting of a shared set of rules by a speech community. English dog 'dog' is a convention our speech community shares. Using /z/ to pluralize it is a common morphological convention we share. Human languages are largely arbitrary and conventional.

Standard language

Dialect given special prestige in language use. By the end of the Middle English period, Southeast Midlands became privileged so that it becomes a basis of modern Standard English.

Dialects

Scholars distinguish five main ME dialects: Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands, Southern, and Kentish. We noted the rounding of OE long-a to long open-o as separating other dialects from Northern.

External history

Events in social and cultural life that affect language. In our study of Middle English the following historical events have special influences on the use and structure of English: 1066 Norman Conquest, 1204 loss of Norman continental lands, 1348 Black Death, 1476 Caxton's printing press.

Internal history

Change in the structure of language over time. Example:External historical events: The Norman Conquest makes Norman French a superstratum language in England for about two hundred years. This situation results in the decline of the late West Saxon literary standard's position, large variations in English spelling in regional dialects, and, ultimately, the borrowing of a large number of French words into English--all of which are internal changes.

 

Phonology:

Sound structure of a language. Middle English vowel structure changes, e.g., OE /æ:/ > ME open long-e and some consonant clusters simplify (hring > ring). Three major sounds changes from OE to ME were that vowels in final unstressed syllables changed to schwa, final-/m/ in these contexts became /n/, and often this final-n was deleted. This set of changes explains much of the reduction of inflections. We use IPA symbols in / / to show sounds. We use two vowel charts as a help in developing a basic sense of basic ME pronunciations in southeast Midlands dialect (Chaucer's language). Remember McGowan's rough rule: Associate the ME graph (letter) with the IPA vowel symbol it resembles.

Orthography:

The writing system of a language. OE orthography developed from the adoption of the Latin or Roman alphabet to represent English sounds. ME writing introduces a number of Anglo-Norman spelling practices; e.g., <ou> for <u> to represent /u:/ and <gh> for <h> to represent /x/. The spellings of Chancery clerks (government writers) in the London area become preferred during the development of printing and become standard forms; however, after some of these spellings were established, the Great Vowel Shift changed the pronunciation of long vowels. Caxton's printing press (1476) contributes to this standardizing of spelling. We use letters in italics or < > to show graphs or written letters.

Lexicon

Set of words and bound morphemes in a language. A literate speaker understands the phonological, orthographic, and semantic shape (pronunciation, spelling, meaning) of these items and also their morphological and grammatical characteristics. During Middle English, the lexicon changes with the addition of many words from French, Old Norse, and Latin.

Morphology

Rules of word formation including compounding, derivation, and inflecting. Old English morphology included a much more complicated inflectional system than Middle English. By analogy and sound change, inflections are reduced.

Morpheme

Smallest meaning unit in the formation of a word. Free morphemes may occur as independent words; bound morphemes always occur within a word attached to a stem or base word. Many free morphemes are added to the English lexicon by borrowing during ME.

Inflection

Bound morpheme that expresses grammatical information. E.g., -as, an important inflection of a-stem strong masculine verbs in OE expresses nominative or accusative case and plural number; it is attached to nouns to mark that case and number. In Middle English, this inflection is changed to /s/ by sound change and just signals [+plural] and then is extended to other noun classes by analogy. This inflection is, in fact, the ancestor of our ModE plural inflection for nouns.

Synthetic language:

Language building meaning and grammatical relations into single word particularly by the use of inflections. OE is synthetic, fusional, and highly inflected. Reduction of inflections changes this grammatical strategy.

Analytic language:

Language that mainly uses word order and function words (prepositions, auxiliary verbs, pronouns) to signal grammatical relations, rather than depending heavily on inflections. Middle English is analytic and much less inflected than OE. It is step toward ModE 's inflectional simplicity. Middle English is the period of reduced inflections.

Function word

Words whose main meaning expresses a grammatical relationship in the sentence. With the reduction of the inflectional system, ME depends more on function words and word order; it becomes more analytic in its grammar. Function words include pronouns, determiners, prepositions, and helping verbs. Also called grammatical word. Contrast with lexical word. Most function words in English are native words from OE, but a major exception is they, them, their, borrowed from ON into Northern ME.

Lexical word

Words whose content is the main meaning. (McGowan says roughly , "Having meaning out there in the real world.") Lexical words include native words and borrowed words. Many lexical words associated with government, administration, law, high culture, religion, architecture, the military, and fashion were borrowed from Old French into Old English.

Grammar or Syntax:

Rules that order arrangement of words in a sentence. ME has agreement rules between subjects and verbs that are still more complicated than ModE. (See the slide in the Power Point discussion of ME.)

Semantics:

Rules about the meaning of words and utterances. Meanings can change over time. Our Word Museum exhibitswill recognize some of these changes. In class we worked with OE hund 'dog' but its meaning narrows to "a certain kind of dogs" in Middle English; see sense 2 under dog, n.¹, in the OED. One result of the borrowing of French and Latin into English was the ability to make small distinction among words in a similar semantic field. Coleridge described the development of separate meanings from synonymous terms that borrowing set up as "desynonymization."

Pragmatics:

Rules governing the social use of language. In ME, a new social use of second person pronouns developed: plural ye and you were sometimes used in singular reference to express respect, politeness, or distancing.

Old English and Middle English Relations

Section II of our course has noted changes from OE to ME. Fennel describes some of these changes in reading assignments; you should be able to understand such descriptions. But you also need "to know" some basic changes and ideas about them.

Old English:

Form of English spoken and written between 449 and 1100 by the Anglo-Saxon invader-settlers of Britain. By 1100, enough changes occur that linguists label the language "Middle English."

Middle English

Historical variety of English spoken, written, and sung in England from 1100-1500. Major changes from OE are reduction of inflections and large borrowings in the lexicon from French and Latin.

Declension

Group sharing common inflections to which an OE noun or adjective belongs. Each of the columns on the item-arrangement grammar shows a declension's basic pattern. The largest noun declension in OE was the a-stem strong masculine nouns. By ME this declension set up becomes much more simplified.

Case

Form of noun, pronoun, adjective, or definite article in OE that expresses its function or agreement in a phrase. In working with OE case, we use the Latinate terms nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. By ME, nouns are inflected for number (singular or plural) and subject and object functions have no case inflections.

 

Genitive:

OE case form of possessive nouns. (A few verbs in OE do take genitive objects.) By ME, the different set of possessive inflections generally are reduced to /s/ -es from the strong a-stem masculine genitive singular. Modern English signals this relation with {S₂}.

Number:

Grammatical category signaling singular or plural. Middle English pronouns lose the OE dual number distinction.

Late West Saxon

Old English dialect which because of the special position of Wessex through King Alfred's defense against the Vikings and his revival of learning develops as a kind of written standard of Old English. Because of the rise of French as superstratum language following the Norman Conquest, West Saxon and its ME development, Southern, lose this special status.

Grammatical gender and natural gender

Special marking of nouns which some linguists have labeled as masculine, feminine, and neuter. Three OE words all meaning 'woman' cwen, wifmann, and wif are marked as feminine, masculine, and neuter in the system of grammatical gender. English moves to a system of natural gender in Middle English, a characteristic some linguists propose as helpful in ModE's role as world language.

Agreement

A grammatical rule by which items in a phrase share grammatical meanings. OE adjectives and definite articles agree with nouns in case, number, and gender through their inflections. ME loses this synthetic rule: the is the only definite article form; the only adjective inflection is -e // (schwa) signaling "weak adjective" or "plural." ME verbs have a more complicated subject-verb agreement rule than the {S₃} of Modern English; they agree in person and number in the present singular but have only one plural inflection. The handout on ME grammar gives all the inflections you need to understand and know.

A-stem strong masculine

Largest declension of OE nouns. From its genitive singular -es develops the general ME -es and Mode {S₂}; from its nominative-accusative plural -as develops ME -es and Mode {S₁}. The endings change to -es /s/ by sound change and are endings are attached to nouns from other declensions "by analogy."

Analogy

Language change by which an inflection from one group is generalized to affect members of other groups. E.g., a child develops the past tense form knowed by analogy, giving this strong verb the characteristic dental suffix of weak verbs, the larger class in English.

Middle English Grammar and Morphology

McGowan's one-page ME grammar handout describes the main grammar rules and inflections you should know. a copy is available on the S-drive. We've also used the first eighteen lines of Chaucer's General Prologue as a sample of ME grammar.

Weak adjective:

Adjective form preceded by a determiner in a ME noun phrase. The inflection -e (schwa) is used with ME single-syllable ME weak adjectives ending in consonants. E.g., his swete breeth has a pronounced final-e on swete, a weak adjective.

Strong adjective:

Declension of adjective inflections for adjectives not preceded by a determiner. ME strong adjectives receive -e when they modify plural nouns.

Determiner

Articles, possessive adjectives, and demonstratives (this, that, those, these in Mode) that can precede an adjective in a noun phrase in English. Having a determiner makes an adjective weak in its inflected forms. Determiners are function words.

Person

Grammatical category expressing relation to speaker. First person in Modern English includes I and we, pronouns of the speaker. Second person includes you, the person spoken to. Third person are the other pronouns and nouns. ME verbs agree with subjects in number and person. ME third person plural pronouns have different dialect forms with the ON th- forms taking over from the OE h- forms.

Dental suffix

Combination with /d/ or /t/ that forms past tense inflections in weak verbs in Germanic languages, including English. As English develops more strong verbs change to weak forms.

Strong verbs

Verbs that form past tense by a vowel change called vowel gradation or ablaut. E.g., run, ran, run in Modern English. OE and ME had more strong verbs in their lexicons than ModE.

Middle English Lexical Developments

Borrowing

Expanding the lexicon by introducing or adapting a word or morpheme from another language. Borrowing has given Modern English a cosmopolitan vocabulary; however, OE was more conservative in lexical expansion, depending more on derivation, compounding, functional shift or conversion, and semantic change to handle new cultural concepts. OE did borrow a little from Celtic and some from ON and Latin. Middle English marks the development of greater acceptance of borrowed lexical words in the lexicon particularly from Old French and Latin.

Norman-French

French dialect of the Norman rulers of Britain which develops into Anglo-French or Anglo-Norman in England. This dialect or its developments are the source of many Old French words borrowed before 1250. Dictionaries use the abbreviations NF, AF, AN, and OF to indicate such etymons.

Central French

Prestigious Parisian dialect of Old French which is the source for much borrowing into English after 1250.

Old Norse:

Language spoken by Scandinavian raider-settlers of Britain during Old English period. Linguists hypothesize that OE and ON speakers could communicate and that a number of ON words for common cultural items were borrowed into OE and ME. The Mode th-forms of the third person plural pronoun (they, their, them) were borrowed from ON and replaced the OE "native" h-forms, and some linguists propose that {S₃} also develops from ON, replacing the native -eth (OE -eð) inflection in the third present singular verb. For English to borrow such common function words and inflection is unusual; most function words and inflections are native, i.e., developed from Old English.

Latin

Source of many learned, theological, and scientific words borrowed into ME. Sometimes scholars have difficulty in distinguishing a Latin etymon from an OF etymon because French developed from Latin

Celtic:

IE branch including the language of the Britons and Gaelic languages of Ireland and Scotland. OE and ME borrowed very little from these languages, mainly placenames. Canterbury, e.g., is a compound of Old Welsh cant 'border' and OE burh 'fortified place.

Great Vowel Shift

Great Vowel Shift

Major phonological change between Middle English and Modern English that affected the ME long vowels. The high long vowels became diphthongs and the other long vowels moved up a slot in the vowel chart. some of McGowan's rules for determining ME vowel pronunciations apply steps in the Great Vowel Shift, including his "Flip Flop Rule" about open and close long-o pronunciations.

Inconsistent spelling

A liability for World English. Some of the spelling inconsistencies in English are caused by late ME spellings becoming established as standard forms, but the Great Vowel Shift changing the pronunciations of the words. The development of printing with mechanical type promoted this establishing of spellings. Caxton's press was set up in Westminster in the southeast Midlands and often used the Chancery Standard spellings of words.

Early Modern English

Dates: 1500-1700. By 1500, the Great Vowel Shift has changed the long-vowel system radically, and English has borrowed many more words from Latin and French. Scholars call this next stage of the language "Early Modern English." Fennell notes by this period, "the structure of the standard language was very close to its structure in Present-Day English" (138) so you know many points about EModE morphology and syntax. She also makes the break between Early Modern and Modern English at 1800, making the development of American English and other varieties, the main distinction. McGowan makes the break 1700 because of developments in standardization in the eighteenth century.

EModE Morphology and Grammar

Much of the noun and verb morphology is similar to Present Day English; however, we did discuss some significant differences:

• Present tense verbs still have -est and -eth inflections. Shakespeare can say, "Thou studiest," because the language still has a separate singular second person pronoun. The King James Bible reads, "He liveth," because this -eth is still the common third person singular present tense verb inflection. The Northern-inluenced -(e)s has not take over yet.
• Singular and plural second person pronouns exist: thou, thee, thin and ye, you, your. But speakers start to use the plural to address a single person with respect or some sense of distancing; the thou and thee start to have a sense of closeness or possibly lack of respect. Shakespeare uses such distinctions in his play. They started to develop in late Middle English.
• Early Modern English can still use Verb + Subject word order to ask a question. The use of periphratistic-do in negatives and questions is beginning to occur; by 1700 the do-forms are required (Fennell 144-45).