공동연구 : 영어의 인칭대명사 변화

Abstract

English personal pronouns have preserved a fairly complete system of inflections while other grammatical categories such as adjectives and nouns have lost inflections. Old English had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) and three numbers (singular, dual, plural). For each gender only the third person singular has distinctive forms. The first person singular and plural, the second person singular and plural, and the third person plural have no separate forms for genders. With the disappearance of the dual numbers by the end of Old English, Middle English had two numbers, singular and plural like in Modern English. Old English accusatives were fused into datives resulting in three cases, i. e. nominative, genitive and objective. All these changes in personal pronouns are classified into two divisions, linguistic internal and external. The first person singular and plural, the second person plural and the third person singular, masculine and neutral plural have been through phonemic changes. On the other hand, the others, the second person singular, the third person singular feminine and the third person plural should be explained from the sociolinguistic point of view with the internal phonemic change since extralinguistic factors have influenced the historical direction of linguistic change. The second person singular pronoun `you` in Modern English developed from the Old English plural `ge- which expelled the original singular pronoun `thou(ðu)` from Modern Standard English. The replacement of the original singular pronoun `thou(ðu)` by the plural pronoun `you` can be explained sociolinguistically with respect to politeness. The third person plural `they` `their` `them` has been developed by Scandinavian influence. The normal development of the Old English pronouns would have been `hi(he), here, hem` and these are very common. In the districts, however, where Scandinavian influence was strong, the nominative `hie` began early to be replaced by the Scandinavian form `Pei (O. N. peir`), and somewhat later a similar replacement occurred in the other cases, `their` and `them`. As for the development of the third person singular feminine pronoun, the relation of the feminine and masculine pronoun should be considered in regards to the woman`s position in the linguistic community, i. e. in Middle English society. The position of woman necessitated the replacement of personal pronoun `he-o` with demonstrative pronoun `se-o` which functioned as personal pronoun. This demonstrative `se-o` has become the Modern English `she`.