Accidence: Inflection and Order of Words
Accidence is the study of the inflection and order of words, i.e. the change of form and order in words to indicate the part they play in the sentence.In English, the inflection is not so important a factor in the expression of our thought as it once was. The part a word plays in the sentence is now often indicated, not by its form, but by its position in the sentence. The subject of the sentence usually stands before the verb, the object after it: 'The mother (subject) loves her child' (object). Verbs once had many more endings than they now have: Old English ic lufie, we lufiath, now I love, we love. Today the singular and the plural of the verb have the same form in the first person, while in Old English the endings of the verb indicated singular or plural. We now feel that the subjects I and we are sufficient to make the thought clear. In the Old English period, nouns and adjectives had endings for case and gender and the case endings varied according to the gender so that English expression at that time was quite complicated. The many endings were, of course, intended to make the grammatical relations clear, but the great complexity of the forms to a certain extent hid these relations, i.e. stood in the way of an easy discernment. The later reduction of the forms and the simplification of the word-order made the grammar visible and the thought easy to understand.
On the other hand, we now often use more words to express ourselves than our ancestors.
In Old English the superlative of the adjective always was a single word with a superlative ending, -est or -ost. We now often put most before the simple adjective to form the superlative: 'Mary is the most beautiful and Jane the most beloved, but 'The sisters are all beautiful, but Mary is the most beautiful.
Notice the accents. To emphasize the quality, we stress the adjective, but we stress most to emphasize the idea of degree. This shading of the thought is impossible in Old English, since there is only one word there. Alongside of the new superlative, however, we still often employ the old simple form: 'Of the sisters Mary is the prettiest.' Thus in English we often find the old and the new side by side. The simple form with an ending we call a synthetic form, the new form with an additional word an analytic form. The old synthetic forms are, in general, best pre served in poetic language, where there is usually a strong tendency to prefer the old, as hallowed by the use of our older masters.
The most remarkable case of an increase in the forms of our language is the introduction of the expanded form of the verb: 'He is working in the garden.' It came into the language in the Old English period under the influence of church Latin. At first it was not differentiated in meaning from the common form of the verb, but later in the modern period it gradually acquired distinctive functions of its own, greatly enriching the language. The development and extensive use of the expanded form clearly show that the English people is not averse to the increase of the forms of the language where they add to its power of expression.
In this treatise on accidence, the inflection of words, i.e. their forms or lack of form, is treated in the usual order of the parts of speech, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections.
In Syntax, the manner of using these forms is described more fully. Accidence and syntax are closely related in actual speech, in fact inseparable, but for practical pur poses they are separated in this book as much as possible. It is thought helpful to the student to arrange for him in systematic shape all the forms of the language, the bare forms, free from syntactical discussion as much as possible, so that he may always have for ready reference a complete outline of all the formal means of expression in the language. And yet a certain amount of explanation must often be introduced to make the grammatical character of a form clear. At many points a good deal of explanation must be given, for it is important to know all the functions of the form if we are really to know it. In Syntax we get to see the form at work in different categories scattered throughout the book and cannot there become acquainted with it as a grammatical form in its entirety. Only in Parts of Speech and Accidence can we acquire an intimate acquaintance with the forms of the lan guage as means of expression. Hence it often occurs that the important forms of the language are discussed thoroughly here.
