Lecture 5 development of nominal parts: noun. Adjective. Pronoun. Numeral

Outline

I. General notion of OE Grammar.

II. OE Noun:

1. Noun in Proto-IE language

2. grammatical categories;

3. declensions of OE Noun

3i. strong declensions;

3ii. weak declension;

3iii. root declension

3 iv. minor declension

III. OE Pronoun. General remarks.

1. personal pronouns

2. demonstrative pronouns

3. other classes

IV. OE Adjective:

1. strong declension;

2. Weak declension;

3. degrees of comparison.

V. Numeral in OE.

VI. Noun in Middle and Modern English

VII. Pronoun in Middle and Modern English

VIII. Adjective and Numeral in Middle and Modern English

I. General notion. Old English was a synthetic (or inflected) type of a language, i.e. the relations between words and other grammatical meanings were expressed by synthetic grammatical forms: endings, sound-interchange in the root, grammatical prefixes and suppletive forms.

We distinguish the following OE parts of speech: the Noun, the Adjective, the Pronoun, the Numeral (nominal parts of speech), the Verb, the Adverb, the Preposition, the Conjunction, the Interjection. Inflected parts of speech possessed certain grammatical categories which are subdivided into nominal (found in the nominal parts of speech) and verbal ( found in the finite verb). There were 5 nominal categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison and definiteness/indefiniteness.

II. 1) Noun in ie.

The historical grammar of all Indo-European languages bases its description of the Noun on the original Indo-European noun-system. The Indo-European Noun conformed to a three-part structure: root – stem-suffix – inflexion. (пор. рос. Реб-ят-а, гот. Dag-a-m). Nouns were divided into classes (groups) according to the type of their stem-suffix, which, perhaps, had been of certain semantic significance to the ancient mind. The most important Indo-European classes (groups) of nouns are:

o-stems i-stems ā-stems u-stems

n-stems root-stems

other cons. stems

By the beginning of the historic period of the Germanic languages stem-suffixation had evidently lost their former significance and the distinctions between different classes of nouns had become obliterated (стерті), which resulted in the reshaping of the noun-structure: thr stem-suffix and the inflexion merged into one.

As a result of Germanic Vowel Shift not all Indo-European sounds (vowels) were retained in the parent Germanic language. Thus, for example, Indo-European back vowels o and ā appear in the Germanic languages as a and ō respectively. So, Indo-European stems correspond to Germanic as the following:

a-stems i-stems ō-stems u-stems

n-stems root-stems

other cons. stems

2) Grammatical categories of oe Noun

OE Noun had 3 grammatical (or morphological) categories: number, case & gender.

The OE gender is a lexico-grammatical category, i.e. male beings need not necessarily be denoted by nouns of the masculine gender. The same applies to nouns denoting female beings. Thus, for example, the OE noun wīf (wife) is neuter and the OE noun wīfmann (woman) is masculine. Very often, however, OE gender corresponds to natural sex distinctions, ex.:

Masculine: fæder (father), cyninz (king), man (man)

Feminine: mōdor (mother), cwēn (qween), dohtor (daughter).

Contrary to the rule in Ukrainian, the OE gender is not distinguished either by the noun’s inflexion or the type of declension. It is proved by the fact that nearly all declensions include nouns of 2 or 3 genders (the only exeption is the group of ō-stems nouns where only nouns of feminine gender belong). In some cases the gender of OE nouns could be identified by the demonstrative pronoun or adjective preceding the noun.

OE nouns were inflected to show number. The category of number consisted of 2 members: Singular and Plural. Duality is distinguished within personal pronouns.

The category of case comprised 4 cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative.