Minor Groups of Verbs - раздел Образование, LECTURE 8 OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Several Minor Groups Of Verbs Can Be Referred Neither To Stro...
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)rɪt/-presents" or "past-present" verbs. Originally the Present tense forms of these verbs were Past tense forms (or, more precisely, IE perfect forms, denoting past actions relevant for the present). Later these forms acquired a present meaning but preserved many formal features of the Past tense. Most of these verbs had new Past Tense forms built with the help of the dental suffix. Some of them also acquired the forms of the verbals: Participles and Infinitives; most verbs did not have a full paradigm and were in this sense "defective".
The conjugation of OE preterite-presents is shown in Table 15.
The verbs were inflected in the Present like the Past tense of strong verbs: the forms of the 1st and 3rd p. sg were identical and had no ending – yet, unlike strong verbs, they had the same root-vowel in allthe persons; the pl had a different grade of ablaut similarly with strong verbs (which had two distinct stems for the Past: sg and pl). In the Past the preterite-presents were inflected like weak verbs: the dental suffix plus the endings -e, -est, -e. The new Infinitives sculan, cunnan were derived from the pl form. The interchanges of root-vowels in the sg and pl of the Present tense of preterite-present verbs can be traced to the same gradation series as were used in the strong verbs. Before the shift of meaning and time-reference the would-be preterite-presents were strong verbs. The prototype of can may be referred to Class 3 (with the grades [a~u] in the two Past tense stems); the prototype of sculan – to Class 4, ma an – to Class 5, witan, wāt ‘know’ – to Class 1, etc.
In OE there were twelve preterite-present verbs. Six of them have survived in Mod Ε: OE āʒ ; cunnan, cann; dear(r), sculan,sceal; maʒan, mæʒ; mōt (NE owe, ought; can; dare; shall; may; must). Most of the preterite-presents did not indicate actions, but expressed a kind of attitude to an action denoted by another verb, an Infinitive which followed the preterite-present. In other words, they were used like modal verbs, and eventually developed into modern modal verbs. (In OE some of them could also be used as notional verbs, e.g.:
THE NOUN Grammatical Categories The Use of Cases The category of number consisted of two... Table...
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Minor Groups of Verbs
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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
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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