Earliest Morphological Changes in Middle English

Abstract

The history of English since 1050 may be regarded as consisting of two periods with the year 1300 as a very rough terminus ad quem for the first and terminus a quo for the second. The period from 1300 to the present has been characterised by very extensive changes in the phonetic form of English and by important syntactic changes but not by correspondingly great changes in the morphological pattern of English speech. The morphological changes in nouns and adjectives have been almost wholly the result of the loss of final e and to a very small extent the result of analogical processes. Analogical processes have resulted in important changes in the inflectional pattern of verbs but in verbs also changes in morphological structure have been to a much greater extent the result of other causes, especially the displacement of forms ending in -en by forms ending in e and the subsequent loss of final e.