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Лекція № 4 the old english verb
The system of the Old English verbs was less developed than it is now. It had fewer forms, and its categories were somewhat different from the similar categories in present-day English. Some of them were ambiguous . The grammatical nature of the others is not recognized by scholars. Still, its paradigm fairly complicated. As all the verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and employed a variety of form building means. The form-building devices were gradation (vowel interchange), the use of suffixes, inflections, and suppletion. Inflections were also present when other ways were employed, so we can say that the ways of forming paradigmatic forms were – inflections, combined with vowel interchange or suppletion, or pure inflections.
All the paradigmatic forms of the verbs were synthetic. There were also lexical structures with non-finite forms of the verb rendering some grammatical meanings.
Categories
The verb in Old English has the following categories: person, number, tense and mood.
Number is not a specifically verbal category but rather a way of agreement of the predicate with a subject represented by the opposition of the singular and the plural. The choice of singular or plural form depends on the number of the noun/pronoun subject of the sentence.
The category of person is represented by all the three persons. Present Tense Singular has all the forms , whereas in plural the category is not shown. Past Tense Singular had only one form of the 1-st and the 3-rd person, and in the Imperative and Subjunctive mood the category of person is absent.
The category of Tense was represented by opposition past/nonpast (Present)
The category of mood was represented by the opposition of three moods – Indicative – Subjunctive – Imperative.
The Indicative mood represents the action as a real fact
On ðǣm æftran zēare com Swezen cyninz… (on the next year came king Sweyn)
The Imperative expresses order, or request to a second person. It may be used in he singular or in the plural.
Sinz mē hwæt-hwuzu (sing me something).
Subjunctive is always a relative not the absolute mood. This is the mood that renders the general meaning of unreality or supposition.
Zif ðū wǣre her, nǣre mīn brōðor dēad (if he were here, my brother wouldn’t be dead)
Morphological classification of Old English verbs
The system of the Old English verbs was less developed than it is now. It had fewer forms, and its categories were somewhat different from the similar categories in present-day English. Some of them were ambiguous . The grammatical nature of the others is not recognized by scholars. Still, its paradigm fairly complicated. As all the verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and employed a variety of form building means. The form-building devices were gradation (vowel interchange), the use of suffixes, inflections, and suppletion. Inflections were also present when other ways were employed, so we can say that the ways of forming paradigmatic forms were – inflections, combined with vowel interchange or suppletion, or pure inflections.
All the paradigmatic forms of the verbs were synthetic. There were also lexical structures with non-finite forms of the verb rendering some grammatical meanings.
The above table of conjugation of verbs shows that the means of building grammatical forms in Old English for different groups of verbs. Most forms were made by means of vowel interchange or grammatical suffixes accompanied (or not) by inflections.
The majority of OE verbs fell into two divisions : the strong verbs and the weak verbs. The main difference between these groups lies in the way they form the principal forms; besides there were a few other differences in conjugation.
Accordingly, the verbs may be divided into the following groups:
strong
weak
preterite-present
suppletive