Grammatical Categories of the Noun in the history of English

The OE Gender, being a classifying feature disappeared together with other distinctive features of the noun declensions.

The grammatical category of Case was preserved but underwent profound changes in Early ME.

The number of cases in the noun paradigm was reduced from four (distinguished in OE) to two in Late ME.

In the strong declension the Dat. was sometimes marked by •e in the Southern dialects, though not in the North or in the Midlands; the form without the ending soon prevailed in all areas, and three OE cases, Nom,, Acc. and Dat. fell together. Henceforth they can be called the Common case, as in present-day English.

Only the Gen. case was kept separate from theother forms, with more explicit formal distinctions in the singular than in the plural. In the 14th c. the ending -es of the Gen.'sg had be­come almost universal, there being only several exceptions — nouns which were preferably used in the uninflected form (names of relation­ships terminating in -r, some proper names, and some nouns in stereo­typed phrases). In the pi the Gen. case had no special marker — it was not distinguished from the Comm. case as the ending -(e)s through analogy, had extended to the Gen. either from the Comm. case pi or, perhaps, from the Gen. sg.

In the 17th and 18th c. a new graphic marker of the Gen. case came into use: the apostrophe — e. g. man's, children's: this device could be employed only in writing; in oral speech the forms remained homonymous.

The Comm. case, which resulted from the fusion of three OE cases assumed all the functions of the former Nora., Acc. and Dat., and also some functions of the Gen.

The ME Comm. case had a very general meaning, which was made more specific by the context: prepositions, the meaning of the verb- predicate, the word order.

In ME the Gen. case is used only attributively, to modify a noun, bul even in this function it has a rival — prepositional phrases, above all the phrases with the preposition of.

The other grammatical category of the noun, Number proved to be the most stable of all the nominal categories. The noun preserved the formal distinction of two numbers through all the historical periods.

In Late ME the ending -es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the pl. In Early NE it extended to more nouns — to the new words of the growing English vocabulary and to many words, which built their plu­ral in a different way in ME or employed -esasone of the variant endings.

The small group of ME nouns with homonymous forms of number (ME deer, hors, thing) has been further reduced to three "exceptions" in Mod E: deer, sheep and swine.