- •2. The common features of Germanic languages.
- •1. The old Germanic languages, their classification and principal features.
- •3. The chronological division of the history of English. General characteristics of each period.
- •4. The Scandinavian invasion and its effect on English.
- •5. The Norman Conquest and its effect on English.
- •6. The dialectal situation of English from a historical perspective.
- •7. Principal Old English and Middle English written record.
- •8. Major spelling changes in me.
- •12. Consonant changes in the history of English
- •9. The oe sound system. Vowel and consonant changes in Old English.
- •Loss of Consonants:
- •10. Monophthongs in the history of English.
- •11. Diphthongs in the history of English
- •14. The oe noun system.
- •15. The simplification of the noun declension in English
- •30. The main trends in word formation in history of English
- •16. The development of personal pronouns in the history of English.
- •17. The development of the adjective in history of English
- •18. The development of demonstrative pronouns in the history of English.
- •13. Form-building means in the history of English
- •19. Oe verbal system.
- •20.Weak verbs in oe & their further development.
- •21. Strong verbs in oe and their development.
- •22. Oe preterite-present verbs and anomalous verbs and their further development.
- •26. The causes of changes in the morphological system in me & ne. The origin of modern English regular and irregular noun forms.
- •23 .Changes in the verb conjugation in the history of English.
- •27. The principal features of oe syntax.
- •24. The rise of analytical forms within the verbal system in the history of English.
- •Formation
- •25. Verbals in the history of English
- •Infinitive
- •28. The main trends in the development of English syntax.
- •29. Oe vocabulary & its etymological characteristics.
- •31. Borrowings as a source of the replenishment of e vocabulary in me & ne.
20.Weak verbs in oe & their further development.
The weak verbs were formed with the help of the dental suffixes -t/-d:
(līcian (Infinitive) – līcode (Past Indefinite) The division of weak verbs into classes was based on the original stem-building suffix of a verb. Had 3 principle forms:
-Inf.(macian)(make)
-Past Sg(macode)
-PartII(macod)
Germanic origin. Presented a productive type (because they were were not as complex as strong ones and had a greater regularity and simplicity).Had 3 classes. They differed in:
-the ending of the Inf.
-the sonority of the suf.
-the sound preceding the suf.
Class 1(stem-suffix -j
most verbs – with front root-vowel
derived from nouns, adjectives)
Class 2(stem-suffix –oja
most numerous class
most verbs – with back root-vowel)
were built with the help of o/oj
Class 3( 3 verbs only:
habban (to have), libban (to live), secζan (to say))
ME main changes: the 3rd class merged with class 1
NE: the development of the inflection-te(de)in early NE shows the origins of the Modern variant.
Re-arrangement:
The turning of weak verbs into strong was very rare and was mainly based on phonetic similarity between some strong and weak verbs (e.g. to wear was originally weak and became strong because of the mistaken analogy with to swear)
21. Strong verbs in oe and their development.
The OE verb had numerous persons and number cases, but fewer gram. categ. than NE verb had.
Str. verbs form their Past tense by changing their root vowel, had 4 principle forms:
Infinitive – wrētan;
Past sg – wrāt;
Past pl – writon;
Participle II – writēn.
Often denoted the most important actions and states. In NE they are mainly irregular verbs.
Had 7 classes (according to the type of vowel gradation/ablaut (Eg: беру – брал):
1-6 classes use vowel gradation;
7 class include reduplication verbs, build their Past tense repeating the root vowel.
Some verbs with the root ending in –s; -p; -f employed an interchange of consonants [s → z → r], [θ → ð → d], [f → v];
Classes 4 and 5 differed in the stems of Part. II. Classes 2, 3 and 4 – had identical vowels in the stems of Part. II.;
In ME the inflections -an, -on, -en were all reduced to just one inflection -en.
In NE the ending -n was lost in the Infinitive and preserved in the Participle 2 in order to distinguish these two forms.
In NE Past Singular and Past Plural forms were unified, usually with the Singular form preferred as a unified form because Past Plural and Participle 2 often had similar forms and it was hard to distinguish them (e.g. ME writen (Past Pl) – writen (Part. 2)) the category of Number disappeared in the Verb.
In ModE the subdivision into classes was lost though we still can trace some peculiarities of this or that class in the forms of the irregular verbs.
Re-arrangement:
Weak verbs were not as complex as strong ones and had a greater regularity and simplicity. That’s why they were productive, i.e. all borrowed verbs used weak model of form-building (suffix -t/-d) (e.g. Scand. to skate, Fr. to charm, Lat. to decorate, etc.) and, as it has already been mentioned above, many originally strong verbs turned into weak (e.g. to bake, to laugh, to help, to lie, etc.).