Grammatical Change

Grammatical change is slower and less immediately visible than lexical change, but its effects are more fundamental. The transformation of English from a highly inflected, flexible-word-order language (Old English) to a largely uninflected, fixed-word-order language (Modern English) is one of the most dramatic grammatical shifts in the history of any major world language. For AQA A-Level English Language, you need to understand the key grammatical changes, explain their causes, and evaluate theories about why language change occurs.

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The Loss of Inflections

Inflectional morphology is the system by which words change their form (typically through suffixes) to express grammatical relationships such as case, number, gender, tense, and person.

The loss of inflections is the single most important grammatical change in the history of English. It occurred gradually between the late Old English period and the early Middle English period (roughly 900–1300).

What Was Lost