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Grammatical Categories. The Use of Cases

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Grammatical Categories. The Use of Cases

Grammatical Categories. The Use of Cases - раздел Образование, LECTURE 8 OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR The Oe Noun Had Two Grammatical Or Morphological Categories: Number And Case...

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 classifying feature accounting, alongside other features, for the division of nouns into morphological classes.

The category of number consisted of two members, singular and plural. As will be seen below, they were well distinguished formally in all the declensions, there being very few homonymous forms.

The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative. In most declensions two, or even three, forms were homonymous, so that the formal distinction of cases was less consistent than that of numbers.

Before considering the declension of nouns, we shall briefly touch upon the meaning and use of cases.

The functions of cases in OE require little explanation for the Russian student, since they are those which ought to be expected in a language with a wel1-developed case system.

The Nom. can be loosely defined as the case οf the active agent for it was the case of the subject mainly used with verbs denoting activity; the Nom. could also indicate the subject characterised by a certain quality or state; could serve as a predicative and as the case of address, there being no special Vocative case, e. g.:

The Gen. case was primarily the case of nouns and pronouns serving as attributes to other nouns. The meanings of the Gen. were very complex and can only roughly be grouped under the headings “Subjective” and “Objective” Gen. Subjective Gen. is associated with the possessive meaning and the meaning of origin, e. g.:

Objective Gen. is seen in such instances as ‘surveying of the land’; and is associated with what is termed "partitive meaning" as in sum hund scipa ‘a hundred of ships’, husa selest 'best of the houses'. The use of the Gen. as an object to verbs and adjectives was not infrequent, though the verbs which regularly took a Gen. object often interchanged it with other cases, cf.:

Dat. was the chief case used with prepositions, e. g.:

The last example illustrates another frequent use of the Dat.: an indirect personal object.

The OE Dat. case could convey an instrumental meaning, indicating the means or manner of an action:

Alongside the Acc., Dat. could indicate the passive subject of a state expressed by impersonal verbs and some verbs of emotion:

The Acc. case, above all, was the form that indicated a relationship to a verb. Being a direct object it denoted the recipient of an action, the result of the action and other meanings: 94

(Its use as an object of impersonal verbs, similar to the use of Dat., is illustrated by

Besides these substantival functions the oblique cases of OE nouns, especially the Acc. case, could be used in some adverbial meanings, e.g. to indicate time or distance:

It is important to note that there was considerable fluctuation in the use of cases in OE. One and the same verb could be construed with different cases without any noticeable change of meaning. The semantic functions of the Gen., Dat. and Acc. as objects commonly overlapped and required further specification by means of prepositions. The vague meaning of cases was of great consequence for the subsequent changes case system.

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LECTURE 8 OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR

THE NOUN Grammatical Categories The Use of Cases The category of number consisted of two... Table...

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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
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 bu

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

Table 13

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