51. Categories of the Verb in me.

• The Middle English verb in different syntactic contexts could take a finite (inflected) or a non-finite (uninflected) form.

• The finite forms were inflected by means of suffixation, the addition of inflectional morphemes to the end of the stem of a word, for the following verbal subcategories:

mood: indicative, subjunctive, imperative;

tense: present, past;

number: singular, present;

person: first, second, third.

The non-finite forms, the forms unmarked for tense, number and person, were: infinitive, past participle, present participle and gerund.

52. Development of Future and Passive in English.

Future:

• In OE there were only 2 tense forms: the Present and the Past. There was no Future. Its meaning was often expressed by the present tense-forms accompanied by the lexical units denoting future time.

• In OE future actions could also be expressed by descriptive phrase consisting of the verbs sculan or willan followed by the Infinitive (Table 81).

• In ME the usage of such descriptive phrases became wide-spread. The verbs shule and wile began to lose their lexical meaning turning into auxiliary verbs that served to form the Future Tense: thou shalt lykne him to the hound (you will compare him to the hound).

Passive:

• There was no category of Passive in OE. The forms of the Voice in OE were rudimentary (hatan).

• The combinations of a finite form of the verbs bēon/wesan or weorðan followed by Participle II were often used.

• In OE these combinations usually formed a Compound Nominal Predicate. The whole combination expressed the state of the subject as a result of some action. The agent or the acting force was not expressed in the sentence: e.g. Se bēra wæs of stæʒen.

At the beginning of ME Participle II lost its agreement with the Subject and the 3^rd element of the construction began to be expressed. The construction turned into an analytical form, especially when “by” was used to introduce the 3^rd member of the construction. The prepositions used throughout the ME period were: by, from, mid, of, through, with

53. Development of Continuous Aspect in English.

• In OE there was no grammatical category of continuity

• There were free word-combinations of the type wæs ʒanʒende, which rendered the meaning of action in which rendered the meaning of action in progress. This meaning was implied in Participle I, which originally was adjective and could be used as a part of the Compound Nominal Predicate.

• Participle I characterized the subject by showing the state of a person (or thing) during some period of time: hē wæs feohtende.

• The construction of this type was close to the one with the verbal noun: he was on huntin ʒe (verbal noun) and he was huntinde (Participle I). The meaning is nearly the same the phrases differ only by the preposition on used in one of them.

• In some time the endings of verbal nouns and participles which came after -ʒ and –d were reduced. The 2 sounds happened to be at the end of the word and were very often mixed. As a result, out of the 2 endings only –ing was preserved.

• In the course of the ⅩⅤ century the preposition reduced into a-, which was used as a prefix of the ing-form.

Appeared 2 parallel constructions with the only difference between them – the element a-: is spreading, is a- coming. The constructions easily fell together with the resulting meaning being taken from the verbal noun. The verbal noun itself acquired some of the meanings of the verb, thus turning into a new non-finite form - the Gerund. The element a- was used up to the end of the ⅩⅦ century.