Lecture 4. Old English Grammar

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. OE employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root, grammatical prefixes and suppletive formation in building grammatical forms.

Grammatical endings were the principal form-building means used: they were found in all the parts of speech, they could be used separately and sometimes in combination with other means. The sound interchange was used on a limited scale and was often combined with other form-building means, especially endings. Vowel interchange was more common than the interchange of consonants.

The OE Noun

The OE Noun had two grammatical or morphological categories: number and case. Nouns distinguished three genders, but it was not a grammatical category, it was merely a classifying feature accounting for the division of nouns into morphological classes.

The category of number consisted of two members, singular and plural. They were well distinguished formally in all declensions, there being very few homonymous forms. The noun had four cases.

The OE system of declensions was based on a number of distinctions: the stem-suffix, the gender of nouns, the phonetic structure of the word, phonetic changes in the final syllables. The morphological classification of OE nouns rested upon the most ancient (IE) grouping of nouns according to the stem – suffixes. The stem suffixes could consist of vowels (vocalic stems), of consonants (consonantal stems), of sound sequences. Some groups of nouns had no stem-forming suffixes or had a zero suffix (root stems).

The OE Pronoun

The OE pronouns were divided into personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. As for the other groups – relative, possessive and reflexive – they were not fully developed yet and were not always distinctly separated from the four main classes. The grammatical categories of the pronouns were either similar to those of nouns or corresponded to those of adjectives. Some features of pronouns were peculiar only to them.

OE personal pronouns had three persons, three numbers in the 1^st and 2d persons (2 numbers – in the 3^rd) and three genders in the 3^rd p. The pronouns of the 1^st and 2^nd p. had suppletive forms like their parallels in other IE languages. OE pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions.

There were two demonstrative pronouns in OE: the prototype of NE that which distinguished three genders in the singular and had one form for all the genders in the plural and the prototype of this with the same subdivisions.

The OE Adjective

The adjective in OE could change for number, gender and case. Those were dependent grammatical categories or forms of agreement of the adjective with the noun it modified or with the subject of the sentence if the adjective was a predicative. Like nouns, adjectives had three genders and two numbers. The category of case differed from that of nouns: they had five cases. The Instrumental case was used when the adjective served as an attribute to the noun in the Dative case expressing an instrumental meaning.

As in other OG languages, most adjectives in OE could be declined in two ways: according to the weak and strong declension. The formal differences between declensions, as well as their origin, were similar to those of the noun declension. The strong and weak declensions arose due to the use of several stem-forming suffixes in PG.

The difference between the strong and weak types of declension of adjectives was not only formal but also semantic. Unlike a noun an adjective did not belong to a certain type of declension. Most adjectives could be declined in both ways. The choice of declension was determined by a number of factors: the syntactical function of the adjective, the degree of comparison and the presence of noun determiners. Most OE adjectives distinguished between three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative and superlative.

The OE Verb

The OE verb had the categories of person, mood and tense. There 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 were far more obvious than their verbal features.

The OE verbs were divided into 2 major classes: the strong verbs and the weak ones. There were also some minor groups in OE. The strong verbs formed their stems by means of vowel gradation (ablaut) and by adding certain suffixes. The strong verbs had four stems, as they distinguished two stems in the Past Tense. The weak verbs derived their Past tense stem and the stem of Participle II from the Present tense stem with the help of the dental suffix.

There were about three hundred strong verbs in OE. They were divided into 7 classes. The number of the weak verbs in OE exceeded that of strong verbs. Their number constantly grew, all new verbs derived from other stems were conjugated as weak. There were many derivatives of OE noun and adjective stems and also the derivatives of strong verbs built from one of their stems. The weak verbs formed their Past and Participle II by means of a dental suffix.

The minor groups included preterite-present verbs, anomalous verbs and suppletive ones.