r and mal-, and suffixes -age, -al, -ery, -ess and -ity directly descend from the French. Syntax Old English was characterized by a much freer word order than Present-Day English allows. However, because of the loss of many of its inflections, Middle English was typified by a more rigid word order. Despite the increasing regularity of English sentences, the more prestigious French language left its mark on this aspect of the English language. For this reason, although ME preferred the native adjective-noun construction, the French noun-adjective pairs were acceptable in loan phrases. French supported the continuation of Old English constructions that were French-like. In addition to the noun-adjective construction, Middle English continued to treat certain adjectives as nouns, a practice that was common in Old French as well as Old English. Although the use of adjectives as nouns has dropped out of the PDE grammar, that practice was kept alive through Middle English by the assistance of the French influence. One syntactic construction that was new to Middle English was the use of the preposition of to convey the possessive. This new usage was probably supported by the French particle de which was already being used in a possessive sense. Yet another new construction to Middle English was the use of the perfect infinitive tense (“to have held them under”). This construction was most likely created by influence from similar Latin and French constructions. Middle English saw an emergence of polite second-person pronouns, a practice that was influenced by and modeled from the French. For example, in Gawaine and the Green Knight, Arthur uses one form of ‘you’ when addressing Guinevere and another when addressing Gawaine. Gawaine himself uses even a third second-person pronoun when addressing the Green Knight. Semantics One of the more difficult areas to see change in is that of semantics. From the limited set of data ...
