OE MORPHOLOGY. NOMINAL PARTS OF SPEECH.

1. The Noun.

A) Grammatical categories of OE Nouns.

B) Noun declensions.

2. The Adjective. Grammatical categories.

3. The Pronoun.

4. The Numeral.

1. The Noun. A) Grammatical categories of oe Nouns.

Nominal parts of speech:

• Nouns;

• Adjectives;

• Pronouns;

• Numerals.

PIE had been an inflected language and its descendants had retained inflections to a greater a lesser extent. There were still many inflections in the speech of the Anglo-Saxons when they came to England, but the system had already begun to break down.

Noun Grammatical categories:

1. Case

In the immediately antecedent form of Germanic there were probably five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental. The last of these is obscure both syntactically and morphologically, but morphologically in nouns it seems to have completely merged with the dative case no later perhaps than the very earliest texts. However, adjectives and pronouns continued to have a separate instrumental singular inflexion available throughout the period.

Nouns had 4 cases: Nominative (the subject case), Accusative ( the object case), Genitive (indicating possession), and Dative (used after most prepositions and also as the indirect object).

2. Number: Sg. And Pl.

The number system was basically as in present-day English, i.e. there was usually only a distinction between singular, referring to one, and plural, referring to more than one.

3. Gender: MFN

Present-day English has only natural gender, Gender in OE is not ‘sex’. As in Indo-European languages generally, the gender of Old English nouns is not dependent upon considerations of sex. Often the gender of Old English nouns is quite illogical. Words like moegden (girl), wīf (wife), bearn (child, son), and cild (child), which we should expect to be feminine or masculine, are in fact neuter, while wīfmann (woman) is masculine because the second element of the compound is masculine.

Noun declensions:

What do we mean when we say that a noun (or an adjective) belongs to some particular declension? We mean that that noun follows a particular paradigm, that it has attached to it a set of inflexions (and possibly other morphological changes) which are also attached to some other nouns. A group of nouns which all have the same set of inflexions attached to them are the members of a particular declension.

Nouns in Indo-European had the characteristic structure of root + theme + inflexion. Let us take as an example the nominative singular of the word for stone in Primitive Germanic, i.e. *stainaz. At first sight it looks as if its structure is stem * stain- + inflexion *-az. But this is not so. The -a- which we have analysed as part of the inflexion is an ending common to all nouns of the same declension, whereas the -z is the normal ending of the nominative singular, compare here PrGmc *winiz ‘friend'. The crucial difference between the two words, therefore, is the vowel which occurs after the root (the lexical unit distinguishing one word from another) and before the inflexion, which the two words share. In these words this differentiating vowel is called the theme. The combination of root + theme gives us the morphological element which is called the stem.

E. g. wulf is called an ‘a-stem’ because the endings were once connected to the root by an *-a-: wulf<*wulβ-a-z.

Themes in Germanic were of three types: (i) a vowel; (ii) a consonant; (iii) zero, and so we can talk of vocalic nouns, consonantal nouns and athematic nouns. In the development of the Germanic languages one type of consonantal nouns assumed an importance far in excess of all others; these are nouns with thematic -n-. Traditionally the vocalic stems (i.e. stems with a theme containing a vowel) are called strong nouns, the n-stems are called weak nouns, and the remaining consonantal and athematic stems are grouped together in the so-called minor declensions. As we shall see later, the terms 'strong' and 'weak' have been overworked and we shall, to avoid ambiguity, restrict their usage to adjectives and verbs.

Let us instead use for nouns the three-way distinction: vocalic ~ consonantal ~ athematic. The following diagram gives the approximate proportion of nouns in each of the main types, namely vocalic and n-stems. One or two other types ignored here, notably the athematic and r-stems, although they contain very few nouns, do contain nouns of extremely high frequency.

masculine vocalic 35 %

masculine n-stem 10 %

feminine vocalic 25 %

feminine n-stem 5 %

neuter vocalic 25 %