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Middle English and New English Vocabulary

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MIDDLE ENGLISH AND NEW ENGLISH VOCABULARY The vocabulary in the ME period shows great instability and constant and rapid changes. Many words became obsolete; a lot of them reflected the ever-changing life of the speakers and were under the influence of contacts with other nations. 1. Internal means of enriching vocabulary. Internal sources of vocabulary growth became less important in ME. It might have been due to great expansion of foreign words (especially French). Beginning with the 15 century up the 17 c. the role of internal sources became more important though the stream of words from other languages continued. As before, the word formation fell into two types: word derivation and word composition. Word derivation Under …show more content…

The word is transformed into another part of speech with an identical initial form: NE house – to house. [The growth of conversion is accounted for by grammatical and lexical changes during the ME period: reduction of endings and suffixes and simplification of the morphological structure of the word.] After the loss of endings and suffixes a large number of English verbs and nouns became identical in form: OE ME NE lufu n – lufian v love n – love(n) v love n – love v In Late ME this pattern began to be applied by analogy in creating new words, mainly verbs from nouns. In present-day English conversion has grown into one of the most productive ways of word-building. Their part of speech belonging is determined by their syntactical position. Word composition Many compound words recorded in OE texts went out of use in ME. In ME word compounding was less productive than in OE, but in Early NE its productivity grew (together with other means of word formation. As before, compounding was more characteristic of nouns and adjectives than of verbs. In ME in some compounds, especially nouns, the order of the components resembles that of free groups, e.g. ME swete

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