8. The Old English pronouns and their further development in me and ne. The rise of the articles in English.

OE pronouns had almost the same classes as those in ME: personal, demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite. As for relative, possessive and reflexive – they were not yet fully developed and were not separated from 4 main classes. The grammatical categories of pronouns were similar to those of nouns and adjectives, but they had their peculiar features as well.

Personal pronouns had 3 persons, 3 numbers and 3 genders. Pers.pron. began to lose some of their case distinction. F.e. the forms of the Dat. Case of the 1^st and 2^nd person were used instead of the Acc. Case.

Demonstrative – there were 2 of them, the prototype of NE that which had 3 genders in the sg ad 1 form in the pl., and prototype of NE this with the same subdivision. They were declined as adj.

Interrogative hwa(Masc. & Fem.) and hwaet (Neut.) had a four-class paradigm(NE who, what).

Indefinite were a numerous class embarrassing several simple and a large number of compound pronouns.

There are 2 linguistic factors that caused the rise of the articles in English. The growth of def. article the is connected with the changes of declension of adj. , namely with the loss of distinction btw strong and weak forms. Originally the weak adj. had a certain demonstrative meaning , these forms were used together with the demonstrative pronoun se, seo, _aet. The strong forms conveyed the meaning of indefiniteness which was later transferred as an. In case the nouns were used without adj. the form-words an and _aet turned out to be the only means to express that meaning and later became articles.

Another reason was the changing function of word order. Freedom in the position of words made it possible for speaker to present a new thing or to refer a thing already known to the listener. But when the word order became fixed these communicative functions passed to the articles and their usage became more regular.

9. The Old English verb, its grammatical categories, morphological types.

The OE verb had a few grammatical categories and its paradigm was rather complicated: they fell into numerous morphological classes and employed various form-building means. All the forms were synthetic, as analytical forms were only appearing. The verb agreed in the sentence with the subject in number and person. Specifically verbal characteristics were mood and tense. Finite forms had 2 numbers: sg and pl; 3 forms of persons. There were 3 moods: Imperative, Indicative and Subjunctive; and only 2 Tenses: Present and Past, future was expresses with the help of Present Tense.

There were 2 non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the Participle. They were close to nouns and adjectives than to verbs. Their verbal nature was constituted only in the syntactical functions; they could take a direct object and be modified by adverbs. The Infinitive had no verbal characteristics, had a reduced case system(Nom and Dat). Participle I was opposed to Participle II through voice and tense distinction. Part.I was formed from the Present tense stem with the help of suffix –ende or by the root vowel interchange.

Morphologically all OE verbs were divided into 2 large classes: the strong and the weak verbs. Besides there were some verbs which were put together as ‘minor’ groups. The main difference btw strong and weak verbs lay in in the means of forming stem of the verb. There were some differences in conjugation as well.

The strong verbs formed their stems by means of vowel gradation and by adding some suffixes. The strong v. had 4 stems. The weak v. derived their stems from the Present tense form with the help of suffix –d or –t and didn’t changed the root vowel.

Minor groups of the verb included Preterite-presens, Suppletive and Anomalous verbs, which combined the features of weak and strong verbs in a peculiar way.