Morphological Changes in English from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth Century as Represented in Two Literary Works: William Shakespeare's Play The Merchant of Venice 17th Century and George Bernard Shaw's Play Arms and the man 20th Century.

الفالح, أماني أحمد (2018) Morphological Changes in English from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth Century as Represented in Two Literary Works: William Shakespeare's Play The Merchant of Venice 17th Century and George Bernard Shaw's Play Arms and the man 20th Century. Masters thesis, جامعة الشرق الاوسط.

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Abstract

This study concerns one aspect of language change, morphological change .In this thesis two literary works which were written in two different centuries have been examined and analyzed. The first one is a seventeenth century play The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, and the second is a twentieth century play Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw. This study follows a descriptive, content analysis of two texts to explore the diachronic change in morphology between these two plays. The data of this study come from selected dialogues of characters in the two plays by a special randomization process. The findings of this study reveal that there are changes in some morphological patterns and word forms. A major change that emerged is the loss of the singular pronoun thou and its grammatical function. The plural pronoun you referred to the plural for the second person in the seventeenth century. Later the pronoun you replaced thou in all grammatical cases, nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, possessive or reflexive , in Arms and the Man. This change in the use of the second person singular pronoun and other changes are presented and discussed in this study. As a consequence of the loss of thou, verb endings also changed they were related to thou in the Merchant of Venice. Key words: morphological change, English, word structure, plays, 17th &20th centuries

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