31. The Morphological Classification of the oe Verbs.

All the OE finite verbs can be subdivided into 4 divisions: two major – strong and weak, and two minor – preterite-present and anomalous (sometimes called suppletive). Strong verbs formed their stems by means of vowel gradation and by adding certain inflections and suffixes. Among all the paradigmatic forms of strong verbs there are four basic forms: 1) the Infinitive, 2) the Past singular, 3) the Past Plural and 4) Participle Ⅱ

32. The Non-Finite forms of the verb in OE and their further development. = 30впр

33. Principal Features of oe Syntax.

The syntactic structure of a language can be described at the level of the phrase and at the level of the sentence. There were 2 conditions which predetermined the syntactic structure of OE: (1) it was a synthetic kind of language and the relations between words were expressed mainly by the system of the grammatical forms of words; (2) the written form of the language resembled oral speech, therefore complicated sentences were rather rare. OE phrases were built on the following syntactic relations agreement, government and joining. Attributes precede or follow the head-noun; apposition follows the head noun, negations are not limited in number. The main parts of the sentence were the subject, the predicate, the object, the attribute, the adverbial modifier. The word order in a simple sentence was comparatively free, though often direct word-order was preferable. The order could be direct – with the subject preceding the predicate, inverted n- with the predicate preceding the subject (usually such sentences started with an object or an adverbial modifier) – when secondary parts of the sentence are put between the principal parts of the sentence or between the parts of the predicate. In OE there existed “impersonal” sentences of the type “мені подобається” Table: 55-57

34. Oe Vocabulary.

The OE vocabulary is mainly homogeneous. Loan-words are an insignificant part of it. Among native words we can distinguish the following layers (Table: 58):

1. Common Indo-European words (names of some natural phenomena, plants and animals, agricultural terms, names of parts of the human body, terms of kinship, etc.; this layer includes personal and demonstrative pronouns and most numerals)

2. Common Germanic words (words are shared by most Germanic languages, but do not occur outside the group. This layer is certainly smaller than the layer of common IE words. Semantically these words are connected with nature, with the sea and everyday life.) 3. Specifically OE words, not found in any other language. These are very few.

The OE vocabulary develops in 2 ways: (1) by forming new words from elements existing in the language; (2) by taking over words from other languages. Borrowed words constituted only a small portion of the OE vocabulary – all in all about six hundred words. OE borrowings come from two sources: Celtic (very few, because the contacts between the Germanic settles and the Celtic in Britain were not very close. Abundant borrowing from Celtic is found only in place-names) and Latin (the first layer goes back to the time of the Roman Empire 1c.BC – 1c. AD; the second layer is made by the words which passed into English at the time of Christianization and due to it, 7-8 cc. AD) (Table: 59)

There are 3 main types of word-building in OE (Table: 60):

1. Morphological word-building (creating new words by means of morphological elements): affixation and composition. 2. Syntactical word-building (building new words from syntactical groups) 3. Semantic word-building (building new words by using existing words in new meanings)