Lecture 6 development of english grammar

Verbal Parts

Outline:

I. Indo-European verb-system

II.. OE Verb:

1. grammatical categories:

   1. Person & Number;

   2. Mood;

   3. Tense;

   4. Aspect;

   5. Voice;

2. morphological classification of OE Verbs:

   1. strong verbs;

   2. weak verbs;

   3. preterite-present;

   4. irregular;

III. Verb in Middle and Early New English:

1. Strong verbs

2. Weak verbs

3. other classes

4. development of analytical constructions

5. categories

IV. Adverb. Degrees of comparison.

I. Indo-European verb-system. The verb in IE is one of the oldest parts of speech. Therefore the development of the verb in any IE languages can be understood only if the old IE verb-system and its peculiarities are taken into account.

The IE verb-stem had the following structure: consonant-vowel-consonant. The sounding of the vowel in the root was dependent on the conditions of the stress falling upon it. This vowel-variation, termed Ablaut, was primarily a phonetic process in IE. In Germanic languages it was widely employed as a grammatical means. The root-vowel could either change its quality (qualitative Ablaut), or its quantity/length (quantitative Ablaut).

Indo-European Ablaut: possible changes of sounding

Qualitative gradation: Quantitative gradation:

o – fully stressed vowel (full grade) ō – prolonged grade

e – weakly stressed vowel (reduced grade) o – full grade

zero – unstressed vowel (zero grade) zero – (zero grade)

IE gradation was first widely used in the category of aspect which represented actions as completed/non-completed, repeated, etc. In IE there existed many aspect forms: the durative, the perfective, and the momentary aspects. Each of these were characterized by a certain grade of the root-vowel. So, in IE there were the following vowel grades for different aspect forms:

Qualitative gradation quantitative gradation

Durative e (reduced grade) o (full grade)

Perfective o (full grade) ō (prolonged grade)

Momentary zero (zero grade) ō (prolonged grade)

In the course of time both sounding and the grammatical meaning of these forms changed:

1) the changes in sounding took place in accordance with the Germanic Vowel Shift: IE e > Germ. e/i, IE o > Germ. a. Thus, in Germanic languages Ablaut was the following:

Germanic Ablaut

Qualitative gradation: Quantitative gradation:

a – fully stressed vowel (full grade) ō – prolonged grade

e/i – weakly stressed vowel (reduced grade) a – full grade

zero – unstressed vowel (zero grade) zero – (zero grade)

2) grammatically, the aspects changed into tenses, that is the categories expressing the time of the action in its relation to the time of the utterance.

Though the IE tonic (musical) stress, which caused gradation, was replaced in Germanic by expiratory one, the primary verbs with Ablaut as a grammatical means survived in English (drink-drank-drunk).

The most prominent feature of the Germanic verb-system is a special type of the past with the dental suffix – d/t. Verbs that formed their past by adding this suffix, came to be termed weak verbs. In subsequent centuries weak verbs in the Germanic languages have been on the constant increase (with the newly appeared and borrowed verbs), while the number of the so-called strong verbs gradually diminished.