- •1№ 1. Germanic languages: their history & classification
- •Table. The classification of old & modern Germanic languages.
- •2. The common features of germanic languages
- •In phonetics:
- •In grammar:
- •In lexis:
- •3. The chronological division of the history of English.
- •4 The Scandinavian invasion and its effect on English.
- •5. Norman Conquest and its effect on English
- •6. The dialectial situation of english
- •Old English Dialects
- •7. Principal oe and me written records
- •8. Spelling changes in me
- •9. Oe sound system
- •Palatal Mutation/I-Umlaut
- •Velar Consonants in Early Old English. Growth of New Phonemes
- •10. Monophthongs in the history of english
- •Qualitative vowel changes in early middle english
- •11. Dipthongs
- •12.Consonant changes in the history of english.
- •Treatment of Fricative Consonants in me and Early ne
- •13. Form-building means in the histoey of english
- •14. Old english noun system
- •15. The Simplification of the Noun Declension in English
- •16. The development of personal pronouns in the history of English.
- •17 The Development of the Adjective
- •18.The development of demonstrative pronouns in the history of English .(Dem pron, their categories , declentions, the decay of declentions & gramm. Categ in Middle e, the rise of articles.)
- •19. The oe verb, its grammatical categories and morphological types.
- •Grammatical Categories oF the Finite Verb
- •20. Old English weak verbs and their further development
- •21. Strong verbs
- •22. Preterite-present and anomalous
- •23. Changes in the verb conjugation
- •25. Verbals in the history of English
- •Development of the Gerund
- •24. The rise of analytical forms in verbal system in me.
- •Category of Voice. Passive
- •Perfect Forms.
- •Interrogative and Negative Forms with do (ne)
- •26. Causes of Grammatical Changes
- •27. Oe syntax
- •28. English syntax.
- •29 Old English Vocabulary
- •30 Word-Formation in Old English
- •31. Borrowings Конспект French and Scandinavian Borrowings in English
Development of the Gerund
The Late ME (14-15c) period witnessed the growth of a new verbal known in modern grammars as the Gerund. The gerund can be traced to three sources; on the basis of verbal noun, but the article and the prepositions were lost and it gained some verbal features like a direct object -J. as well as the frequent absence of article before the ing-form functioning as a noun. Those were the verbal features of the Gerund. The nominal features, retained from the verbal noun, were its syntactic functions and the ability to he modified by a possessive pronoun or a noun in the Gen. case
In the course of time the sphere cf the usage of the Gerund grew: it replaced the Infinitive and the Participle in many adverbial functions; its great advantage was that it could be used with various prepositions It took direct object (verbal feature) (e.g. buying a book); It could be preceded by an article or a possessive pronoun
24. The rise of analytical forms in verbal system in me.
OE didn’t poses any fully-developed analytical forms but certain free syntactic combinations bagan to approach analytical forms in their function and structure.
Part of new anal forms appeared in ME (future, perfect, passive) but others (cont, do-forms) came into use in NE. The rise of anal. forms can be observed in other Gmc lang too.
The general structure of anal. forms: aux. verb (have lost its own meaning, shows tense, mood, number, person) and a notional verb (Infinitive, Participle 1, 2 forms do not express tense but they have the lexical meaning)
The Future Tense
In the OE language there was no form of the Future tense.. The Pres. tense could indicate both present and future actions, depending on the context Alongside this form there existed other ways of presenting future happenings: modal phrases.
In ME the use of modal phrases, especially with the verb shall, became increasingly common. Shall(scullan) plus Inf. was now the principal means of indicating future actions in any context. Shall could retain its modal meaning of necessity, but often weakened it to such an extent that the phrase denoted "pure" futurity. In Late ME texts shall was used both as a modal verb and as a Future tense auxiliary
Future happenings were also commonly expressed by ME willan with an Inf., but the meaning of volition in will must have been more obvious than the modal meaning of shall:
In the age of Shakespeare (14c) the phrases with shall and will as well as the Pres. tense of notional verbs, occurred in free variation; they can express "pure" futurity and add different shades of modal meanings.
In the 17th c. will was sometimes used in a shortened form –‘ll and the rule about the regular interchange of shall and will depending on person was introduced (shall-1st person). The employment of shall and will as Future tense auxiliaries was supported by the use of their Past tense forms — should and would — Ind- and Subj. in similar functions. But nowadays there is a tendency to use will for all persons.