Lecture 3 old english grammar. Development of Nominal Parts

Outline:

I. General notion of OE Grammar.

II. OE Noun:

1. grammatical categories;

2. strong declensions;

3. weak declension;

4. root and minor declensions.

III. OE Pronoun.

IV. OE Adjective:

1. strong declension;

2. weak declension;

3. degrees of comparison.

V. OE Verb:

1. Grammatical categories:

   1. Person & Number;

   2. Mood;

   3. Tense;

   4. Aspect;

   5. Voice;

2. morphological classification of OE Verbs:

   1. strong verbs;

   2. weak verbs;

   3. preterite-present;

   4. irregular;

3. the development of the analytical formations.

VI. OE Adverb. Degrees of comparison.

I. Old English was a synthetic (or inflected) type of a language, i.e. the relations between words and other grammatical meanings were expressed by synthetic grammatical forms: endings, sound-interchange in the root, grammatical prefixes and suppletive forms.

We distinguish the following OE parts of speech: the Noun, the Adjective, the Pronoun, the Numeral (nominal parts of speech), the Verb, the Adverb, the Preposition, the Conjunction, the Interjection. Inflected parts of speech possessed certain grammatical categories which are subdivided into nominal (found in the nominal parts of speech) and verbal ( found in the finite verb). There were 5 nominal categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison and definiteness/indefiniteness.

II. Oe Noun.

1. Grammatical categories.

OE Noun had 3 grammatical (or morphological) categories: number, case & gender. The latter is a lexico-grammatical category. The category of Number consisted of 2 members (Singular and Plural. /Duality is distinguished within personal pronouns/), of Case – 4 cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative).

The most remarkable feature of OE Nouns was their system of declensions, which was based on a number of distinctions: stem-suffix, gender of nouns, phonetic structure of the word, phonetic changes in the final syllables.

In the first place, the morphological classification of OE Nouns is based on Indo-European nouns according to the stem-suffixes. They could consist of a vowel (a-stem, ō-stem, i-stem, u-stem, ja-, jo-, wa-, wo-stems – also called “vocalic” stems; such nouns belong to Strong declension), of consonants (n-stem – called “consonantal” stem; these nouns belong to Weak declension). Some nouns had no stem-forming suffix, so they are called ‘root”-stem nouns and belonged to Root declension. The rest (with their stems in –nd-, -r-, -s-) belonged to Minor declension.

2. Strong declension.

The group of a-stem included nouns of Masculine and Neuter gender. About one-third of OE nouns were Masc. a-stem nouns. The difference between the 2 genders is only seen in the Nomin. & Accus., Plural (-es, -as for Masc). The nouns in ja- & wa-stems are a special type of a-stem nouns.

Singular

Masc. Neut.

N. fisc N. scip

G. fisces G. scipes

D. fisce D. scipe

Ac. fisc Ac. scip

Plural

N. fisces N. scipu

G. fiscal G. scipa

D. fiscum D. scipum

Ac. fiscas Ac. scipu

Nouns in ō-stem were all Feminine. The variants with -j- and -w- (jo- and wo-stems) declined like nouns. The nouns with a short-root vowel had the ending –u, with long-root vowel – no ending at all.

Singular