Nominal morphology

Morphology is a branch of linguistics, which deals with the grammatical forms, categories and meanings. Nominal morphology studies the noun (or substantive), the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral and their categories. These parts of speech are called the nominal parts of speech.

All nominal parts of speech changed their forms in a sentence (like in Modern Russian) because OE was a synthetic, or inflected type of language and in building grammatical forms OE employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root, prefixes and suppletive forms. The manner in nominal parts of speech were inflected is called declension, or a morphological classification.

OE substantives (nouns) and their categories

The Substantive or Noun which is the name of a person, place or thing had two grammatical or morphological categories: number and case. Besides OE nouns distinguished 3 genders, but this distinction was not a grammatical category, it was merely a classifying feature according to which the nouns were divided into morphological classes.

All nouns had inflexions which showed these very categories - gender, number and case. The system of declensions in OE was highly elaborate and based on a number of distinctions: the stem-suffix, the gender of nouns, the phonetic structure of the word, and phonetic changes in the final syllable the main features being the stem-suffix and gender. In OE stem-suffixes were lost, - they merged with the grammatical endings of the nouns, but classification according to the stem-suffixes and genders remained.

Declensions

There were 3 main types of declension in OE: strong, weak and root declension. Nouns with the vocalic stems -a, -o, -i, -u belonged to the strong declension, the nouns of the consonantal stems as n- stems were declined according to the weak declension. OE minor declensions included nouns with s- and r- stems and so called root-stems. In the root declension the grammatical ending was joined to the root without any stem-suffix.

The majority of OE nouns belonged to the a-stems, ō-stems and n-stems. A-stems included masculine and neuter nouns, cniht, hām. Note should be taken of the inflections –es of the genitive sg, -as of the nominative and accusative pl. Towards the end of the OE period these endings began to be added to the nouns of other stems, and survived in MnE as markers of the plural (-es) and possessive case (-s). Nouns of ō-stems were all feminine, nouns of i- and u-stems included nouns of different genders. (Make grammar charts. Rastorguyeva PP. 98 – 99 or Ivanova Grammar addendum).

In MnE these types of declension are lost - we have one major declension consisting of nouns that make their plural by adding -s (this comes to us from the OE strong declension); some nouns make plurals by adding -en (oxen) (these are descended from the weak declension) and other nouns make plurals by changing their vowel (mouse - mice), (they came from the root declension). (Give examples to nouns of OE declensions).

Gender

Every noun was masculine, feminine or neuter, and the gender of a noun did not depend on its "natural" gender. Thus scip and wif were neuter, wifman was masculine.

Number

Number was the easiest inflectional category, and included singular and plural numbers. The dual number survived in personal pronouns (wit we two, git you two).

Cases

There were 5 cases in OE: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental (the latter is not preserved in nouns). Although MnE has cases too, in OE they were more complex and more obvious.

Nominative

Nominative case was used as the case of a subject (the active agent), the case of a predicative and a direct address: hē wæs swīđe spēdig man He was a very rich man. Sunu mīn, hlyste mīnre lāre My son, listen to my teaching.

Accusative

Accusative was the case of a direct object, adverbial modifier of time, object indicating distance: sē wulf nimþ þā scēap The wolf takes the sheep; þā sæton hīe þone winter æt Cwætbrycge Then stayed they that winter at Cwatbridge; lēt him ealne weg þæt wēste land on þæt stāor-bord Was all the way the desolated land on the right side of the ship.

Dative

Dative was used as the case of indirect object: þā sende sē cyning tō þæm here and him cyþan hēt Then sent the king to the army and ordered him to inform them.

Genetive

Genitive was used as possessive, genitive of measure, and also in a partitive meaning: Grendles dæda Grendel’s deeds; hiora scipu their ships; Beowulf gēata Beowulf of the Geats; sum hund scipa a hundred of ships.

Three cases – genitive, dative and accusative in OE had the vague meanings that’s why they all might serve as the cases of object. Vague semantics of the cases is the reason explaining further specification of syntactic relations between words in a sentence by means of prepositions.