Old English Noun Morphology

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This study is an attempt to account in generative terms for several striking changes which took place in the inflectional system of English nouns between the years 1050 and 1300. In those 250 years, most of the earlier case distinctions disappeared, grammatical gender was lost, and the endings of the plural were greatly simplified. In this study, after an introductory chapter on the place of inflectional rules in a generative grammar and the concept of analogy as it is applied in linguistics, the rules which generate the endings of the noun paradigms are formulated (Chapter II), and their phonology is discussed in detail (Chapter III). In the last two chapters the transition from Old to Middle English is taken up and both the formal and function reasons for the changes mentioned above are explored.