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Morphology

I. General Characteristics of oe morphology.

As compared with modern English OE can be characterised as a synthetic or inflected type of language which means that the relationships between the parts of the sentence were expressed by means of different formal elements, that is affixes. In building grammatical forms OE employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root, grammatical prefixes, and suppletive formations.

Grammatical endings, or inflections, were certainly the principal form-building means used: they were found in all parts of speech that could change their form; they were usually used alone but could be used in combination with other means.

Sound interchanges were employed on a more limited scale and were often combined with other form-building means, especially endings. Vowel interchanges were more common than interchanges of consonants.

The use of prefixes in grammatical forms was rare and was confined to verbs. Suppletive forms were restricted to several pronouns, a few adjectives, and a couple of verbs.

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 or nomina); the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction and the interjection . Inflected parts of speech possessed several grammatical categories displayed in formal and semantic correlations and oppositions of grammatical forms. Grammatical categories are usually subdivided into nominal categories, found in nominal parts of speech and verbal categories found chiefly in the finite verb.

It can be assumed that there were five nominal grammatical categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison, and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness. Each nominal parts of speech had its own number of categories, for example, the noun had 2, the adjective five, etc.

Verbal grammatical categories were not numerous: tense and mood – verbal categories proper – and number and person, showing agreement between the verb-predicate and the subject of the sentence.

2. The Noun and Its Grammatical Categories.

An OE word, whether noun, adjective or verb, consisted of 3 basic elements:

- the root of the word

- the stem comprising the root plus a stem-building suffix

- the inflexion or ending which is an indication of case, number, gender and tense.

S tem of the word

Root

Stem-building suffix

Case or other ending

Врем-

-ен

Доч-

-ер

For example, the root expresses the lexical meaning, the case inflexion expresses the relation between the thing denoted by the noun and other things said the category of number. The meaning of the stem-building suffix is more difficult to define. Perhaps, originally, stem-building suffixes were a means of classifying objects, things and phenomena into groups according to some characteristics either internal or external. For example, the stem-forming suffix - (e)r in I-E languages denoted relationship: fadar, broþar, swistar, etc. Or in Russian nouns derived by means of the stem-building suffix- ят, have one common feature: they denote a little creature, a cub: телята, жеребята, утята, etc. But with time (during the OE period), this distinction was already lost and stem-building affixes gradually merged with case endings, thus eliminating the distinction between stem-building suffixes and case endings. But in some cases, 'the stem-building suffixes can be seen. For example, in the Dat. plural of some types of substantives: