Oe grammar. Syntax.

Oe was a synthetic, or inflected type of language; it showed the relation between words and expressed other grammatical meanings mainly with the help of simple (synthetic) grammatical form. The parts of speech to be distinguished in oe are as follows: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral (all referred to as nominal parts of speech), the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection. We shall assume that there were 5 nominal grammatical categories in oe: number, case, gender, degrees f comparison,and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness.

Noun

The OE noun has 2 grammatical or morphological categories: number and case. They also distinguish 3 genders, but this distinction was not a grammatically category, it was merely a classifying feature accounting, alongside other features, for the division of nouns into morphological classes. The category of number consisted of 2 members, singular and plural. The noun had 4 cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative.

The Nom can be loosely defined as case of the active agent, for it was the case of the subject mainly used with verbs denoting activity.

The Gen case was primarily the case of nouns and pronouns serving the attributes to other nouns.

The Dat case could convey an instrumental meaning, indicating the means or manner of an action, was the chief case used with prepositions.

The Acc was the form that indicated a relationship to a verb. (далее по noun стр 96)

Pronoun

In oe personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions: the form of the dat case of the pronouns of the 1^st and 2^nd p. were frequently used instead of acc. It is important to note that gen case of personal pronouns can be an object, but far more frequently it was used as an attribute or noun determiner, like a possessive pronoun. There were 2 demonstrative pronoun in oe: the prototype of Ne that, which distinguished 3 genders in sing and had 1 form form for all genders in pl. (103-104)

Adjectives

Can change for number, gender and case. Those were dependent grammatical categories or forms of agreement of the adj with the noun it modified or with the subject of the sentence – if the adj was a predicative. The category of case in adj differed from that of nouns: in addition to the 4 cases of nouns they had one more case, INSTR. It was used when the adj served as an attribute to a noun in the dat case expressing an instrumental meaning. (105-108)

Verb

Was characterized by many peculiar features. Though the verb had few grammatical categories, its paradigm had a very complicated structure: verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and employed a variety of form-building means. All the forms of the verb were synthetic, as analytical forms were only beginning to appear. The non-finite form had little in common with the finite forms but shared many features with the nominal parts of speech. (109-123)

Syntax

The syntactic structure of oe was determined by 2 major conditions: the nature of oe morphology and the relations between the spoken and written forms of the language. OE was largely a synthetic language; it possessed a system of grammatical forms which could indicate the connection between words; consequently, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech – unless the texts were literal translations from latin or poems with stereotyped constructions. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple ; coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination; complicated syntactical constructions were rare. (124-129)