Grammatical changes

Question 1

Inversion

Answer 1

Verb before subject in Middle English e.g. My case is hard, but yet am i not so desperate

Question 2

Dummy auxiliary

Answer 2

i.e. “do” used to create questions which, in EME, could be done by sentence order e.g. Do you know him? (PDE) vs Know you him? (EME)

Question 3

Negative constructions

Answer 3

“Do” as a dummy auxiliary verb when making a sentence negative e.g. I don’t know, I do not mind (PDE) I know not, I mind not (EME)

Question 4

Contractions

Answer 4

Movement from proclitic contractions (‘tis, ‘twas’) towards enclitic contractions (it’s, won’t)

Question 5

Reason for change in contractions

Answer 5

Biber - increasing informalisation of written language

Question 6

Passive voice

Answer 6

Object appears as the subject of the sentence, omits the agent (doer of the action) e.g. The book was handed to me vs He handed me the book

Question 7

Reason for change in the passive voice

Answer 7

Used more in the Late Modern Period, not used as much now except in legal contexts because it lacks clarity

Question 8

Inflections

Answer 8

Suffixes showing the grammatical form of a word:
- Verbs: tense, person, number
- Nouns: number, gender
- Adjectives: comparatives, superlatives
In EME some inflections were still used that aren’t today e.g. -th and -st (doth, dost)

Question 9

Reasons for change in inflections

Answer 9

1. Inflections are often unstressed when pronounced, less obvious in spoken English - stopped being written as stopped being spoken
2. Complicated system for inflections - moving towards a simpler system a natural development
3. Different dialects used different inflections loss of inflections made it easier for people from different areas to understand each other

Question 10

Subjunctive

Answer 10

Shows a sentence is conditional/hypothetical e.g. If i were to go to the park rather than my lesson, what would happen?

Question 11

Reason for change in subjunctives

Answer 11

We still use ‘if’ but we mainly use ‘were’ as the auxiliary verb rather than the infinitive ‘be’, “If I am to go…” e.g. If music be the food of love, play on’ now sounds outdated

Question 12

Word order/syntax

Answer 12

Construction of sentences and word order was much freer because it was clear by the inflections what the sentence was about. We now usually put the complement last whereas it used to be used first e.g. It is certain vs Certain it is

Question 13

Reasons for change in word order

Answer 13

1) Loss of inflections made sentence construction much more rigid
2) Inflections used to indicate if a word was the subject or object of a sentence e.g. she gave me it/she gave it to me

Question 14

Sentence length and complexity

Answer 14

Liberal use of commas to link long extended clauses, with colons and semi-colons also used to separate clauses to create sentence complexity. This allows the writer to elaborate on their ideas, contributing towards the distinctive formal style of late modern texts

Question 15

Reason for changes in sentence length/complexity

Answer 15

Latin had an influence on sentence structures. Middle English relied a lot on conjunctions such ‘as’ and ‘then’, but EME showed more complex sentence structure

Question 16

2nd person pronouns

Answer 16

EME: second person pronouns ‘thou’, ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ used to address people of similar or lower social standing
LME: more respectful ‘ye’, ‘your’ and ‘you became standard. ‘Ye’ lost by PDE
- ‘They’ rather than he/she to make them more gender neutral

Question 17

Reasons for changes in 2nd person pronouns

Answer 17

Changes in society - increased informality reduced need to express class boundaries through language

Question 18

Relative pronouns

Answer 18

According to 18th century prescriptivists ‘who’ should change to ‘whom’ when it refers to the object in a clause e.g. The man who met me yesterday vs the man whom I met yesterday

Question 19

Reasons for change in relative pronouns

Answer 19

Increased informality in spoken and written language
Biber - increased colloquialisation and economisation of written discourse