Development of Nominal Grammatical Categories

§ 462. The decay of the nominal grammatical categories in Early ME is summarised in Table 4. The figures indicate the number of members or categorial forms distinguished within each category. The column Late ME shows the state of nominal categories in the 15th c., which was the same as in Mod E.

Table 4

Reduction of Nominal Grammatical Categories in Early Middle English

Grammatical Categories

	Gender	Case	Number	Definiteness/ Indefiniteness	Comparison
OE	Late ME	OE	Late ME	OE	Late ME	OE	Late ME	OE	Late ME
Noun		—					—	—	—	—
Adjective		—		—		—		—
Personal pronoun 1st and 2nd p. 3rd p.	—	—					—	—	—	—
						—	—	—	—
Demonstrative pronouns		—		—			—	—	—	—

THE VERB

§ 463. Unlike the morphology of the noun and adjective, which has become much simpler in the course of history, the morphology of the verb displayed two distinct tendencies of development: it underwent considerable simplifying changes, which affected the synthetic forms and became far more complicated owing to the growth of new, analytical forms and new grammatical categories. The evolution of the finite and non-finite forms of the verb is described below under these two trends.

SIMPLIFYING CHANGES IN THE VERB CONJUGATION

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Degrees of Comparison	\|	Finite Forms. Number, Person, Mood and Tense

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