Chapter 9 - Changes in Case Marking in NP: From Old English to Middle English

Abstract

This chapter examines how the important changes involving case morphology within the noun phrase/determiner phrase NP/DP—the loss of case agreement morphology and the “posthead” genitive—evolved in the transition period between Old English (OE) and Early Middle English (EME). OE was a language in which four cases—nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative—were productively distinguished by the morphology on nouns and their modifiers. There was already a good deal of syncretism in the case of morphology in OE. One place in which there was considerable freedom of word order was in the positioning of the genitive NP/DP with respect to its head. The genitive phrase, which could be either a complement or a modifier, could be placed either before its head—which could be a noun, an adjective, or a quantifier—or after it. Whatever the causes of deflexion in EME were, by 1250, an overt distinction between the dative and accusative cases had entirely disappeared, except in some southern dialects, and the marking of the distinction was optional even in those dialects retaining the category distinction.