Early Modern English

GRAMMAR CHANGES IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH

1. Verbs.
a) Present plural has zero inflection, as it is today.
e.g. “two gentlemen haue lost…”

The –en plural ending is an archaism by the time of Shakespeare and Spenser, but is occasionally
used. Likewise, the eth form is found in hath and doth.

b) Third-person singular: -es and –eth - by the 16th cent., -es is more often used. –eth appears in
formal written style, like in:
e.g. judgeth, passeth, teacheth

c) Subjunctive was used. The subjunctive is used to signal doubt, uncertainty or hypothesis and so is
common after such conjunctions as if and though.
e.g. “If he haue robd these men…”

In EME, subjunctive is found in the 2nd and 3rd pers. singular present:
e.g. “he go, thou go” and the non-subjunctive: “he goes, thou goest/goes”.

The subjunctive exists in PDE (“If I were you…”), but it sounds formal and literary.

2. Noun-plurals & demonstratives.

a) Nouns: -es plural was normal in Shakespeare’s time. Likewise the mutated forms like men. The
plural morpheme “s” had developed its three allomorphs /s/, /z/ and /iz/.

b) Demonstratives: this/that, these/those were used as today, but alongside them was a demonstrative
yon, yonder, of obscure origin. It implies “remote from both speaker and hearer”, but also “visible in
sight”, so it is accompanied by a pointing gesture.

3. Pronouns.
a) Personal:

They, them and their were used in Shakespeare’s time and had completely replaced Chaucer’s
they, hem, hire.

You and thou were used, but there was a slight difference between them. Namely, thou was
used when addressing someone by their first name; it implies closeness and openness. It is also used
to address people from a lower class. Contrary, you was a more formal form, when addressing
someone important, from the higher classes.
Among the polite classes, thou was the emotionally-charged form: it could be used to express
intimacy and affection, but also to express anger and contempt.
In the course of the 17th cent., you replaced thou in spoken English, though thou persisted in
literature, especially in poetry.

An innovation was the pronoun its. Before the appearance of its, the possessive form of the
personal pronoun it was him and thus there was no distinction between this and the possessive form of
he. Its spread rapidly and was very common by the 1620s.

b) Reflexive:

For the reflexive use, EME used ordinary pronouns “I’ll hide me”, and not forms with –self, as these
were used for emphasis: “I my selfe…”

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Early Modern English

4. Relative pronouns.
The common relative pronouns in Shakespeare’s time were: who, which and that, but their
use was not restricted as it is today. In the course of the 17th cent., relative that became increasingly
confined to defining clauses, while relative who and relative which became increasingly restricted to
personal and non-personal antecedents respectively. The present-day position is reached by the end of
the century.

THE DUMMY AUXILIARY

Auxiliary do was used in EME, but its use was not restricted as it is today. The PDE
restriction had been reached after Shakespeare’s time, by 1700. In PDE, do performs the four main
functions of an auxiliary (before not, to form questions, echo-repetitions and to give emphasis), but it
is empty in meaning. We use only when no other auxiliary has an appropriate meaning.
Do probably originates from the causative do. It was used in OE and Middle English, but it
was not a dummy auxiliary – it had a causative sense. “He did them build a castle” and “He built them
a castle” have the same meaning and are interchangeable. So, did actually had no meaning and this is
where it started. In the beginning, “He did build” was merely a stylistic variant of “He built”.
The development of the non-causative do became in the South-Western dialects in the late
13th cent. At first it was mainly used in poetry, but the usage spread to prose later on as well. By the
16th cent., it was just a stylistic variant. In the 17th cent., do gradually drops out of affirmative
declarative sentences and comes to be used more and more regularly in negative and interrogative
ones.

CHANGES IN PRONUNCIATION

1. The Great Vowel Shift.

From Chaucer’s time to Shakespeare’s time, pronunciation had changed dramatically. So
much, in fact, that that change was bigger than if we c/c PDE and EME. Changes occurred especially
in the vowel system. This series of changes is known as the Great Vowel Shift, which began early in
the 15th cent. and was not fully completed until late in the 17th. All of the long vowels underwent a
qualitative shift in their point of articulation. This resulted in the following:

MEPDE Examples PDE Spelling

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

2. Consonant Changes.
a) Poststress /sj/, /zj/, /tj/ and /dj/ became /




 

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Early Modern English

b) Loss of preconsonantal /r/. especially after back vowels.

e.g. records
c) Loss of /l/ after a low vowel and before a labial or velar consonant.
e.g. talk, walk, half…

d) Loss of the phonemic distinction between /hw/ and /w/.

e.g. which

e) Loss of /d/ and /t/ in consonant clusters.

e.g. next, book, behind