English grammar has constantly been changing ever since it existed. One of the changes it has suffered has been the decrease of declension, which consists in marking nouns, adjectives and pronouns to indicate a certain grammatical case, gender and number. Together with the loss of declension, Modern English also lost word order freedom, since a certain order needs to be maintained in sentences in order to make meaning. In Modern English, it is only possible to recognize the subject and the object of a sentence for the position that they are in. It is just the pronouns that still have declension and allow change in word order without affecting the meaning. Modern English also keeps using number declension, but this does not influence on variations …show more content…
This paper is going to focus on declension. The sentences that have declension take cases such as grammatical, nominative, accusative and local, and the amounts of cases vary on each language.
2. Old English declension
Llinàs i Grau and Reeves observe that “Old English was an inflecting language, in which grammatical information about the functions and relationships of words in a sentence was carried by the endings (mainly suffixes but for some prefixes) of the words” (1998, p. 90). The old English declension was the same as those of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old High German (Moore and Knott, 2007).
Words had to agree on certain aspects, so if a noun was declined in the singular strong masculine form of the nominative case, the determiners, adjectives and pronouns accompanying it also had to be declined that way.
Old English declension had four cases (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative) three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), three person (first, second and third) and two numbers (singular and plural) (Llinàs i Grau and Reeves,
Kistner, A. L. and M. K. Kistner. “The Five Structures of ‘The Changeling’.” Modern Language Studies 11.2 (1981): 40-53. Accessed March 29, 2014.
Hill, Jane H., P. J. Mistry, and Lyle Campbell. The Life of Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright. Berlin [etc.: Mouton De Gruyter, 1998. Print.
Hallen, Cynthia L. "The History of the Latin Language." Department of Linguistics Brigham Young University. Last modified September 6, 1999. Accessed January 9, 2014. http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450ch/reports/latin.html
New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 113-117. 160. The syllable of the syllable. Perterson, L.K., & Cullen, Cheryl. 2000. The.
Word order also changes, though this process is much slower. Old English word order was much more 'free' than that of Modern English.
In Johnson’s preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson argues the importance of preserving language. Other dialects had a produced their own dictionaries, such as the French and Italians. Various writers of the eighteenth century were alarmed at the fact that there was no standard for the English language, since there was no standard it could easily become extinct. Johnson explored many points, such as how and why languages change as well as how many words are formed.
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In this essay I intend to investigate how differently one of the closed word classes, determiners, are approached in a series of pre and post corpus-based English grammar reference books, course books and practice books. And the theme of my investigation is how corpus affects the development of English teaching materials. The grammar reference books I intend to analyze and compare are “A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language” (ACGEL) and “Cambridge Grammar of English” (CGE). The former is an indispensable grammar reference book first published in 1985, which has been widely consulted in researches in relation to English linguistic studies, while the later offers clear explanations of both spoken and written English grammar based on authentic everyday usage.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. An Introduction to Language. 8th ed. Boston: Thomson, 2007.
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2003). An introduction to language (7th ed.). Boston: Heinle.
Geoffey Chaucer lived from 1343-1400, and during that time wrote multiple works (Smith 7). Chaucer’s language soon became the new standard for writing, for which it differed from Modern English by the pronunciation of long vowels (Weiner 1). “For example, Middle English’s “long e” in Chaucer’s “sheep” had the value of the Latin “e”, which sounded like the Modern English’s “Shape”” (Weiner 1). And while his writing poses multiple similarities to the English spoken today, it still provides enough difference to see the change with the years in between. Without his work, many linguists would not have a clear understanding of how the linguistics shifts within Middle English itself
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113-117. 151-195. The. English: A Linguistic Tool Kit, (2012), (U214, Worlds of English, DVD ROM), Milton Keynes, The Open University. English in the World, (2012), (U214, Worlds of English, DVD ROM), Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Northern they had replaced the earlier Anglo-Saxon hives, but they were still alive. Such became the preferred Chancery form which had ousted bis, sych, seche and swiche. Which was replacing which. The auxiliary verbs appear more regularly in their modern forms: can, could, shall, should and would. A standardised spelling was developed which was divorced from the phonetic environment so that sound and spelling were becoming two separate systems.