The OE personal pronouns, their grammatical categories and declension. Lexical replacement in ME

Personal Pronouns possessed (and still do) a very vivid Indo-European feature – suppletivity (i.e. they build their forms with the help of different roots.

Personal pronouns in OE changed in Gender, Number, Case, Person.

In OE, while nouns consistently distinguished between four cases, personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions: the forms of the Dat. case of the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p. were frequently used instead of the Acc. It is important to note that the Gen. case of personal pronouns had two main applications: like other oblique cases of noun-pronouns it could be an object, but far more frequently it was used as an attribute or a noun determiner, like a possessive pronoun, e.g. sunu mīn.

They have categories of 3 persons, 3 numbers (у 3лица - 2), 4 cases, in 3 person, в 3 лицеед.ч - 3 рода. 1,2 Person have dual number, the 3P - gender. 1,2 – it is ancient paradigm, they are suppletive, 3 – is late, non suppletive. Suppletivity – the expression of grammatical categories of different roots by means of root vowel be, es, ves.

Later the following changes happened to the personal pronouns (some of them are marked with * in the table above so that one can trace the connection easily):

1. Gender is still preserved (he, she, it) in ModE but is often denied by scholars because it is expressed lexically and practically has nothing to do with grammar.

2. Cases: -In ME the Genitive Case turned into a new class of pronouns – Possessive Pronouns (e.g. ModE I (pers.) – mine (possess.); you – yours, he – his, she – her, etc.); -The Dative and the Accusative Cases fell together and formed the Objective Case. Thus in ME there were only two cases left in the personal pronouns – Nominative and Objective (e.g. ModE I (Nom) – me (Obj); he – him, she – her, etc.).

3. Number. Dual forms disappeared in ME.

4. 3^rd person. As far as in the Early ME many forms in the 3^rd person coincided phonetically and often caused confusion and difficulties in communication, the following changes occurred.