Preliminary remarks. Form-Building. Parts of Speech and Grammatical Categories
Preliminary remarks. Form-Building. Parts of Speech and Grammatical Categories - раздел Образование, LECTURE 8 OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR Oe Was A Synthetic, Or Inflected Type Of Language; It Showed The Relations Be...
OE was a synthetic, or inflected type of language; it showed the relations between words and expressed other grammatical meanings mainly with the help of simple (synthetic) grammatical forms. In building grammatical forms OE employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root, grammatical prefixes, and suppletive /sə'pli:tɪv/ formation.
Grammatical endings, or inflections, were certainly the principal form-building means used: they were found in all the parts of speech that could change their form; they were usually used alone but could also occur in combination with other means.
Sound interchanges were employed on a more limited scale and were often combined with other form-building means, especially endings. Vowel interchanges were more common than interchanges of consonants.
The use of prefixes in grammatical forms was rare and was confined to verbs. Suppletive forms were restricted to several pronouns, a few adjectives and a couple of verbs.
The parts of speech to be distinguished in OE are as follows: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral (all referred to as nominal parts of speech or nomina), the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection. Inflected parts of speech possessed certain grammatical categories displayed in formal and semantic correlations and oppositions of grammatical forms. Grammatical categories are usually subdivided into nominal categories, found in nominal parts of speech and verbal categories found chiefly in the finite verb.
We shall assume that there were five nominal grammatical categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison, and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness. Each part of speech had its own peculiarities in the inventory of categories and the number of members within the category (categorial forms). The noun had only two grammatical categories proper: number and case. The adjective had the maximum number of categories – five. The number of members in the same grammatical categories in different parts of speech did not necessarily coincide; thus the noun had four cases, Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Accusative, whereas the adjective had five (the same four cases plus the Instrumental case). Perhaps in the pre-written period the noun had five cases, since cases of adjectives depend on the cases of nouns; this supposition is confirmed by several instances of specific Instrumental noun-endings in the earliest texts.The personal pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p., unlike other parts of speech, distinguished three numbers – Singular, Plural and Dual.
Cf.
Verbal grammatical categories were not numerous: tense and mood – verbal categories proper – and number and person, showing agreement between the verb-predicate and the subject of the sentence.
The distinction of categorial forms by the noun and the verb was to a large extent determined by their division into morphological classes: declensions and conjugations.
The following survey of OE grammar deals with the main parts of speech: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, and the verb. Many features of the OE syntactic structure will be self-evident from the study of morphology; therefore the description of syntax is confined to the main peculiarities which may help to trace the trends of development in later periods. The OE grammatical system is described synchronically as appearing in the texts of the 9th and 10th c. (mainly WS); facts of earlier, prewritten, history will sometimes be mentioned to account for the features of written OE and to explain their origin.
OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Plan
1. Preliminary remarks. Form-building. Parts of speech and grammatical categories.
Grammatical Categories. The Use of Cases
The OE noun had two grammatical or morphological categories: number and case. In addition, nouns distinguished three genders, but this distinction was not a grammatical category; it was merely a c
Morphological Classification of Nouns. Declensions
The most remarkable feature of OE nouns was their elaborate system of declensions, which was a sort of morphological classification. The total number of declensions, including both the major and mi
Table 1
a-stems included Masc. and Neut. nouns. About one third of OE nouns were Masc. a-stems, e. g. cniht
Table 4
Note should be taken of the inflections -es of the Gen. sg, -as of the Nom. and Acc.
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 the 3rd p. The pronouns of the
Table 6
As seen from the table, the paradigm of the demonstrative pronoun sē contained many homonymous forms.
Other Classes of Pronouns
Interrogative pronouns – hwā, Masc. and Fem., and hw et, Neut., – had a four-case paradigm (NE who, what). The Instr. case of hw et was used as a separate interroga
Weak and Strong Declension
As in other OG languages, most adjectives in OE could be declined in two ways: according to the weak and to the strong declension. The formal differences between the declensions, as well as their
Table 7
and also when the adjective formed a part of a
Table 8
The root-vowel interchanges in long, eald, ʒlæd go back to different sources. The variation [a~ æ]
Grammatical Categories of the Finite Verb
The verb-predicate agreed with the subject of the sentence in two grammatical categories: number and person. Its specifically verbal categories were mood and tense. Thus in OE hē bindep
Table 9
1. Some verbs had a narrowed vowel in the 2nd a
Grammatical Categories of the Verbals
In OE there were two non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the Participle. In many respects they were closer to the nouns and adjectives than to the finite verb; their nominal features w
Table 10
As seen from the tables the forms of the two participles were strictly differentiated. Participle I was formed from the Present te
Morphological Classification of Verbs
The conjugation of verbs given in Table 9 shows the means of form-building used in the OE verb system. Most forms were distinguished with the help of inflectional endings or grammatical suffixes; o
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 a high frequency of occurrence a
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
Weak Verbs
The number of weak verbs in OE by far exceeded that of strong verbs. In fact, all the verbs, with the exception of the strong 119 verbs and the minor groups (which make a total of about 315-320 uni
Table 14
Participle II of most verbs preserved -e- before the dental suffix
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 /'pret(ə)
Table 15
Among the verbs of the minor groups there were several anomalous verbs with irregular forms.
OE willan was an irre
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 word phrases (also: word groups
The Simple Sentence
The following examples show the structure of the simple sentence in OE, its principal and secondary parts:
The secondary
Compound and Complex Sentences. Connectives
Compound and complex sentences existed in the English language since the earliest times. Even in the oldest texts we find numerous instances of coordination and subordination and a large inventory
Word Order
The order of words in the OE sentence was relatively free. The position of words in the sentence was often determined by logical and stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints. In the
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