 The Middle English period is marked by the great reduction in the inflectional system inherited from Old English. This tendency was accelerated by the social upheaval and the mixture of tongues that the Norman conquest brought about. But it was already noticeable in Old English from the end of the 10th century. This lecture summarizes the main developments in Middle English morphology. As usual we will look at declension and conjugation. But what exactly were the reasons for the morphological changes? Well, let's start with this question. Among the reasons for language change, two changes seem to have been most effective in Middle English. One of them is language contact. Old English often mixed with Old Norse, even though English and Scandinavian words were sufficiently different, doubts about the correct form of ending arose leading to the use of other devices to express the relevant distinctions. The simplest solution to make long words compatible with Middle English was to drop the inflections completely. A procedure that had already been used to some extent with Latin words in Old English and could now be applied to the French long words that came into the English language during the Middle English period. And then there were phonological reasons. The weakening and the eventual loss of unstressed syllables at the end of words weakened many of the Old English inflections. We already discussed this example in the e-lecture Old English morphology. But this is what happened. In words such as Erdan, first of all the final vowel was reduced, then a typical tendency was that final nasals merged to alveolar nasals, and eventually these nasals were dropped. But by the end of the Middle English period English only had a handful of inflections left over. Let us look at some of them and start with declension. Middle English had changed from a synthetic language to a much more analytic language depending on word order and particles, indicating the functional relationships between the words in a sentence. In comparison to Old English the system of declensions, that is inflections of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and determiners was heavily reduced. So let us look at nouns first. By late Old English the case affix um that denotes the dative in Old English had changed to um. So this is what happened until late Old English. So namum became naman, fulcum had become fulcum and erdan had become erdan. So here you see the merger of the final nasals to alveolar nasals. At about the same time all vowels of all inflectional endings were reduced to schwa plus nasal. Later the final nasal was also lost. So in Middle English the first step was then to reduce these endings to a type without the final nasal. And by late English the final vowel had also disappeared. So the eventual results were nam, fulc and erf, though in many cases in spelling the final e was not dropped. As a result of all these changes the case distinctions in nouns were reduced to two cases by the end of the 15th century. So the cases hund, hundes, hunde, hund, hunde, of course this is the present day English word for dog, hound. These cases were eventually reduced to two cases, the oblique case and the genitive case hundes. Well and in the plural only one case remained, hundas, hundas, hundum, hundas, hundum just became hundes in the plural. The only difference between Middle English and present day English was the use of a few plurals ending in en, which have since disappeared such as iron, hosen, peasant, etc. With two cases and no distinct grammatical genders the morphology of Middle English nouns was in many ways now identical with that of present day English. Needless to say that just like in old English the distinction between singular and plural was fused with the case ending in Middle English. Of all word classes adjectives suffered the greatest inflectional losses in Middle English. Although adjectives were among the most highly inflected word classes in old English they became totally uninflected by the end of the Middle English period. Let's look at an example in old English there was a distinction drawn between the strong and the weak declension of adjectives. The weak declension used adjectives in the context of determiners, se blind a hund, the blind dog, and the strong one blind hund used adjectives without the occurrence of a determiner. Now this distinction between strong and weak declension had vanished almost completely except for monosyllabic adjectives ending in a consonant like blind. This distinction remained in Middle English however it was lost at a later stage of Middle English so that it is not surprising that at the end of the Middle English period it looked like the form in present day English the blind hund. Since adjectival case and gender depended on the nouns they modified these distinctions disappeared when the nouns lost them. In the e-lecture old English morphology we showed that old English demonstratives were highly inflected. There were two forms for the number singular and plural here only the singular is represented. There were three genders and five cases but by the end of the Middle English period only these two forms had survived to denote the singular and in the plural we had these and those. At the same time the indeclinable article V developed. It split off from true demonstratives and at first only replaced old English say and sale the masculine and feminine nominative singular forms of present day English that. Let's look at pronouns next. We already mentioned in the e-lecture about the old English morphology that of all the categories of present day English the personal pronouns are the most conservative. They have retained three cases subject case object case and genitive and are almost identical to those in Middle English with the exception that the old English dual was no longer part of the Middle English system. The major difference between Middle English and present day English was the consistent use of three cases and the maintenance of the second person singular and plural distinction. Middle English had no relative pronoun as such. Instead it used the indeclinable particle that that supplanted old English say as an all purpose pronoun for example as a relative pronoun. Let's finally look at verbs and the system of conjugation. Despite the changes within the verbal system between old English and Middle English Middle English retained at least to some extent all the earlier inflectional categories tense mood number and person and the distinction between strong and weak verbs. Here we have two examples Middle English reason and look and rise and look are the present day English equivalents. And as you can see whereas in the first person singular present tense both forms are identical in terms of their inflectional possibilities reason and look as they're different in the past tense form. First person singular past tense rose the strong form which involves the vocaliic change and look at the weak declension which involves the dental suffix d e the regular past tense suffix. In the past participles the differences were less obvious a reason versus a look at an additional aspect that affected Middle English was the beginning of the use of the complex system of periphrastic verb phrases verb phrases consisting of several elements. Here we have the examples he have had I have had he was led I was led and so on and so forth so aspect and voice was denoted via periphrastic verb phrases and this characterizes today's English. It doesn't make sense to show all forms of several selected verbs in an e lecture of this kind in the virtual linguistics campus unit Middle English morphology you have access to several interactive examples like these. Here you see the verb look and present the English look and by means of simple mouse roll over you can see the translation and you can access further information on the virtual linguistics campus using this and many more examples. Well let's summarize. Middle English had become far more analytic than old English in many ways the inflectional system was similar to that of present day English only few categories were more complex morphologically verbs which had maintained the person distinction and nouns which still used more plural forms than present day English. As the inflectional system decayed other devices were increasingly used to replace it. For one thing word order became more important to mark the main functional elements of claw structure. But that is a different story. So see you again in the e lecture early modern English morphology or in any other e lecture in our channel until then have a nice time.