Blackwell Reference Online

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Tke following five essays focus on tke transformation of Englisk in a number of linguistic criteria: patterns of speeck sounds (pkonology, by Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell), inflectional endings and otker grammatical components (morpkology, by Robert McColl Millar), word order and sentence structure (syntax, by Olga Fiscker), vocabulary and word formation (lexicology, by Geoffrey Hugkes), and verse form (prosody, by Geoffrey Russom). In its kistory, tke Englisk language kas gone tkrough such major changes that Old English often seems closer to German than to modern English: the prepositional phrase “with the poor child,” for instance, is “mid þœm earman aide” in Old English and “mit dem armen Kind” in German. Here the definite article and the adjective have grammatical endings in both Old English (þœm, earman) and German (dem, armen), each denoting number (singular), case (dative), and grammatical gender (neuter). In modern English, neither the nor poor is declined under any syntactic circumstances.The diachronic study of Englisk requires a syntkesis of observations made in individual sub fields of linguistics. To take an intersection between morpkology and pkonology for an example, tke simplification of grammatical endings is interconnected witk tke weakening of unaccented syllables in tke Middle Englisk period. As skown above, tke Old Englisk prepositional phrase “mid þœm ... log in or subscribe to read full text