II.. Oe Verb:
Grammatical categories:
OE Verb was characterized by many specific features. Though it had few grammatical categories its paradigm had a very complicated structure: verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and used a lot of means of form-building. All these forms were synthetic with some analytical elements to appear. The non-finite forms had a little in common with finite verbs, but much – with nominal parts.
1) OE verbs distinguished the following grammatical categories: person, number, mood, tense, aspect and voice.
a) The verb-predicate agreed with the subject in number and person: sing./pl. and 1, 2, 3 persons accordingly. The homonymy of forms didn’t affect number distinctions, they were not neutralized. Unlike number, person distinctions were neutralized in many positions. Person was shown only in the Present, Indicative Mood, sing. form. But in the Past, singular, Indicative Mood the forms of the 1 and 2 persons coincided. In the plural and in the Subjunctive Mood person was not distinguished.
b) The category of mood included 3 members: Indicative, Imperative and Subjunctive. There was not a clear distinction between moods, for there existed several homonymous forms (e.g. Subj. sing. and Indic. 1st, sing.). The Indicative was used to state an action as a real fact. The Imperative expressed order or request (to the 2nd pers.), sometimes – wish. The Subjunctive expressed an action which is supposed, both in the main and subordinate clauses. It was a very general meaning of unreality or supposition. In addition to its use in conditional or volitional clauses, Subj. was also common in clauses of time, result and in indirect speech.
c) The category of tense in OE consisted of 2 categorial forms: Present and Past, and was expressed by synthetic means. The forms of the Pres. were used to indicate both present and future actions. The meaning of futurity could be expressed by verbs of perfective meaning, or phrases with modal meaning. The Past was used to indicate various events in the past (including ModE Past.Cont., Past Perf., Pres.Perf.).
d) As for the category of aspect, it is disputable problem: if there was aspect in OE? How was it expressed? There is a view that aspect was expressed by the opposition of verbs with/without prefix –ze (with perfective or non-perfective meaning accordingly). But it didn’t always work. Recent researches show that –ze can not be regarded as a marker of aspect. It could make the verb perfective, but also could change its lexical meaning (e.g. OE sittan “sit” – zesittan “occupy”, beran “carry” – –zeberan “bear a child”).
Also the verbs without –ze could express a perfective meaning. So, prefix –ze might be regarded as a derivational prefix with some shades of aspective meaning. Aspect in OE also could be expressed through verb-phrases with “habban, bēon, weorðan” and Participle II.
e) The category of voice also existed in OE in the form of synthetic Mediopassive (which existed in Proto-Germanic and was well developed in Gothic). But the most frequent expression of Passive was the combination of Participle II of transitive verbs plus the verbs “bēon” and” weorðan”.