Lecture 4. OE Morphology

1. ANALYTICAL vs. SYNTHETIC MEANS IN MORPHOLOGY.

2. NOUN CATEGORIES IN OE. DECLENSION.

3. THE ADJECTIVE. DECLENSIONS. DEGREES OF COMPARISON.

4. THE PRONOUN

5. VERBAL GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES.

1. STRONG VERBS.

2. WEAK VERBS.

3. PRETERITE-PRESENT VERBS.

4. ANOMALOUS VERBS.

6. SYNCRETISM & ITS IMPACT ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

1. Analytical vs. Synthetic Means in oe Morphology

In mid-19^th century a new classification of languages was developed. It was the typological classification, which deals with grammatical structure of the languages. Typological classification was described first by A. Schleicher and W. von Humboldt. According to it the languages are divided into:

• Isolative

• Agglutinating

• Inflecting

In isolating languages such as Chinese and Vietnamese, each lexical or grammatical unit of information is carried by an individual morph, without affixation or modification. Eg.: Georgian: Miq’varkhan. – I love you.

In agglutinating languages like Turkish morphs are ‘stuck’ together to form words. Each morph has a particular function. Eg.:

Morpheme:	{HOUSE}	{plural}	{possessive}
	ev	ler		evler	Houses
	ev		im	evim	My house
	ev	ler	im	evlerim	My houses

All IE languages are inflecting and can be futher classified into Synthetic and Analytical. Synthetic structure of the language presupposes that both semantic and grammatical meaning of the word is expressed within one word. Among the synthetic means are: grammatical suffixes, grammatical prefixes, vowel interchange, suppletive formation. Analytical structure of the language presupposes that lexical and grammatical meanings are expressed by 2 or 3 grammatical units. Among analytical means are: articles, conversion, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and word order.

Eg.: Ukr: Коти їдять мишей. Мишей їдять коти.

Eng: Cats eat mice. Mice eat cats.

This example shows us explicitly the difference between Synthetic and Analytical languages. In synthetic Ukrainian, regardless of the word order, thanks to the grammatical inflections – it is transparent who is the subject, and who is the object of the action, while in English, it is only word order which points at subject and object.

In languages like Latin, Greek and English and Russian, morphs may carry more than one unit of lexical/grammatical information. For example, in an Old English form such as scipu, final –u indicates that the noun (scip) has neuter gender, is plural and is functioning in either nominative or accusative case. Modern English has both analytic characteristics and synthetic ones. Eg.: 1. I will see you tomorrow; 2. Sleeps (third person singular present indicative). Thus Modern English is more analytical than synthetic. However, both analytical and synthetic means can be found.

Nevertheless, it seems that many languages display a tendency towards one morphological type more than another.

The morphology of the OE is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more highly inflected. As an old Germanic language, OE's morphological system is similar to that of the hypothetical PG reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections common in PIE.

Among living languages, OE morphology most closely resembles that of modern Icelandic, which is among the most conservative of the Germanic languages; to a lesser extent, the OE inflectional system is similar to that of modern High German.