LECTURE 8 OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR

LECTURE 8

OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Plan   1. Preliminary remarks. Form-building. Parts of speech and grammatical categories.

Preliminary remarks. Form-Building. Parts of Speech and Grammatical Categories

Grammatical endings, or inflections, were certainly the principal form-building means used: they were found in all the parts of speech that could… Sound interchanges were employed on a more limited scale and were often… The use of prefixes in grammatical forms was rare and was confined to verbs. Suppletive forms were restricted to…

THE NOUN

Grammatical Categories. The Use of Cases

The category of number consisted of two members, singular and plural. As will be seen below, they were well distinguished formally in all the… The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accu­sative. In most… Before considering the declension of nouns, we shall briefly touch upon the meaning and use of cases.

Morphological Classification of Nouns. Declensions

In the first place, the morphological classification of OE nouns rested upon the most ancient (IE) grouping of nouns according to the stem-suffixes.… The loss of stem-suffixes as distinct component parts had led to the formation… Sometimes both elements – the stem-suffix and the original ending – were shortened or even dropped (e. g. the ending…

Table 1

a-stems included Masc. and Neut. nouns. About one third of OE nouns were Masc. a-stems, e. g. cniht (NE knight), hām (NE home), mūp (NE… As seen from Table 2 the forms in the a-stem declension were distinguished…  

Table 2

 

Table 3

 

Table 4

  Note should be taken of the inflections -es of the Gen. sg, -as of the Nom. and Acc. Masc. Towards the end of the OE…

THE PRONOUN

OE pronouns fell roughly under the same main classes as modern pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefi­nite. As for the other groups – relative, possessive and reflexive – they were as yet not fully developed and were not always distinctly separat­ed from the four main classes. The grammatical categories of the pro­nouns were either similar to those of nouns (in "noun-pronouns") or corresponded to those of adjectives (in "adjective pronouns"). Some fea­tures of pronouns were peculiar to them alone.

 

Personal Pronouns

As shown in Table 5 below, OE personal pronouns had three persons, three numbers in the 1st and 2nd p. (two numbers – in the 3rd) and three genders… In OE, while nouns consistently distinguished between four cases, personal… It is important to note that the Gen. case of personal pronouns had two main applications: like other oblique cases of…

Table 5

 

The oblique cases of personal pronouns in combination with the adjective self could also serve as reflexive pronouns, e. g.; возвратный,

if hwa hw et lytles eni es biwistes him selfum earcode... ‘If any one provided himself with some small portion of food...’

 

Demonstrative Pronouns

There were two demonstrative pronouns in OE: the proto­type of NE that, which distinguished three genders in the sg and had one form for all the genders in the pl. (see Table 6) and the prototype of this with the same subdivisions: pes Masc., peos Fem., pis Neut. and pas pl. They were declined like adjectives according to a five-case system: Nom., Gen., Dat., Acc., and Instr. (the latter having a special form only in the Masc. and Neut. sg). 103

 

Table 6

  As seen from the table, the paradigm of the demonstrative pronoun sē… Demonstrative pronouns are of special importance for a student of OE for they were frequently used as noun determiners…

Other Classes of Pronouns

Indefinite pronouns were a numerous class embracing several simple pronouns and a large number of compounds: an and its derivative eni (NE one,… Pronouns of different classes – personal and demonstrative – could be used in… e.g.: Se pe me eh elde se cw eð to me ‘he who healed me, he said to me’

THE ADJECTIVE

Grammatical Categories

As stated before, the adjective in OE could change for num­ber, gender and case. Those were dependent grammatical categories or forms of agreement of the adjective with the noun it modified or with the subject of the sentence – if the adjective was a predicative. Like nouns, adjectives had three genders and two numbers. The category of case in adjectives differed from that of nouns: in addition to the four cases of nouns they had one more case, Instr. It was used when the ad­jective served as an attribute to a noun in the Dat. case expressing an instrumental meaning – e. g.:

lytle werede 'with (the help of) a small troop'.

 

Weak and Strong Declension

The relations between the declensions of nouns, adjectives and pro­nouns are shown in the following chart:  

Table 7

  and also when the adjective formed a part of a direct address:

Degrees of Comparison

Like adjectives in other languages, most OE adjectives dis­tinguished between three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative and superlative. The regular means used to form the comparative and the superlative from the positive were the suffixes -ra and-est/ost. Sometimes suffixation was accompanied by an interchange of the root-vowel (see Table 8).

 

Table 8

The root-vowel interchanges in long, eald, ʒlæd go back to different sources. The variation [a~ æ] is a purely phonetic phenomenon;… Some adjectives had parallel sets of forms: with and without a vow­el… The adjective ʒōd had suppletive forms. Suppletion was a very old way of building the degrees of comparison…

THE VERB

The OE verb was characterised by many peculiar features. Though the verb had few grammatical categories, its paradigm had a 107 very complicated structure: verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and employed a variety of form-building means. All the forms of the verb were synthetic, as analytical forms were only beginning to appear. The non-finite forms had little in common with the finite forms but shared many features with the nominal parts of speech.

Grammatical Categories of the Finite Verb

Finite forms regularly distinguished between two numbers: sg and pl. The homonymy of forms in the verb paradigm did not affect number distinctions:… The category of Person was made up of three forms: the 1st, the 2nd and the… The category of Mood was constituted by the Indicative, Imperative and Subjunctive. As can be seen from the paradigms…

Table 9

1. Some verbs had a narrowed vowel in the 2nd and 3rd p. sg Pres. Tense Ind.… The meanings of the tense forms were also very general, as compared with later ages and with present-day English. The…

Grammatical Categories of the Verbals

The Infinitive had no verbal grammatical categories. Being a verbal noun by origin, it had a sort of reduced case-system: two forms which roughly… Like the Dat. case of nouns the inflected Infinitive with the preposition tō could be used to indicate the…

Table 10

As seen from the tables the forms of the two participles were strictly differentiated. Participle I was formed from the Present tense stem (the… Participles were employed predicatively and attributively like adjectives and shared their grammatical categories:…

Morphological Classification of Verbs

All the forms of the verb, finite as well as non-finite, were derived from a set of "stems" or principal parts of the verb: the Present… The strong verbs formed their stems by means of vowel gradation and by adding… The weak verbs derived their Past tense stem and the stem of Participle II from the Present tense stem with the help…

Table 11

Strong Verbs

There were about three hundred strong verbs in OE. They were native words descending from PG with parallels in other OG lan­guages; many of them had… The strong verbs in OE (as well as in other OG languages) are usually divided… Classes from 1 to 6 use vowel gradation which goes back to the IE ablaut-series modified in different phonetic…

Table 12

Classes 1 and 3 were the most numerous of all: about 60 and 80 verbs, respectively; within Class 3 the first group – with a nasal or nasal plus a… The history of the strong verbs traced back through Early OE to PG will reveal… The gradation series used in Class 1 through 5 go back to the PIE qualitative ablaut [e~o] and some instances of…

Table 13

Weak Verbs

Weak verbs formed their Past and Participle II by means of the dental suffix… The main differences between the classes were as follows: in Class I the Infinitive ended in -an, seldom -ian (-ian…

Table 14

Participle II of most verbs preserved -e- before the dental suffix, though in some groups it was lost (types (e), and (f)). Two groups of verbs in Class I – types (e) and (f) had one more peculiarity –… The verbs of Glass II were built with the help of the stem-suffix -ō, or -ōj- and are known as ō-stems.…

Minor Groups of Verbs

Several minor groups of verbs can be referred neither to strong nor to weak verbs. The most important group of these verbs were the so-called "preterite… The conjugation of OE preterite-presents is shown in Table 15.

Table 15

Among the verbs of the minor groups there were several anomalous verbs with irregular forms. OE willan was an irregular verb with the meaning of volition and desire; it…

SYNTAX

 

The syntactic structure of OE was determined by two major conditions: the nature of OE morphology and the relations between the spoken and the written forms of the language.

OE was largely a synthetic language; it possessed a system of gram­matical forms which could indicate the connection: between words; consequently, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech – unless the texts were literal translations from Latin or poems with stereotyped constructions. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple; coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination; complicated syntactical constructions were rare.

 

The Phrase. Noun, Adjective and Verb Patterns

The syntactic structure of a language can be described at the level of the phrase and at the level of the sentence. In OE texts we find a variety of… A noun pattern consisted of a noun as the head word and pronouns, adjectives…

The Simple Sentence

The secondary parts of the sentence are seen in the same examples: tweʒen…

Compound and Complex Sentences. Connectives

Coordinate clauses were mostly joined by and, a conjunc­tion of a most general meaning, which could connect statements with various semantic… Repetition of connectives at the head of each clause (termed "correlation") was common in complex…

Word Order

‘the Finns, it seemed to him, and the Permians spoke almost the same language’… ‘many stories told him (lit. "him told") the Permians either about their own land or about the lands that…