WEAK PRETERITE INFLECTIONS IN THE 'CURSOR MUNDI'

The present paper examines, discusses and compares inflections in the preterite weak verb system of Cotton and Trinity manuscripts of the 'Cursor Mundi'. Its goal is to determine the extent to which the verbs comply with the paradigms formulated by the standard historical grammars of English, and areas/issues with respect to which the two MSS do not pattern alike. It will be shown that while the Cotton MS exhibits virtually no inflectional marking, the Trinity MS is only halfway through with the dropping of person/tense/number distinctions. It will be also demonstrated that some of the verbs found in the Trinity MS gave in to simplification more readily than others.