THE OE VERB, ITS GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES AND MORPHOLOGICAL TYPES.
The OE verbs had synthetic forms and analytical forms were beginning to develop. The non-finite forms had little in common with the finite forms but shared many features with the nominal parts of speech.
Classification:
- Finite:
Tense – Present and Past (NB no Future! – future actions were expressed by the Present Tense forms);
Mood – Indicative, Imperative, Superlative;
Person – 1st, 2nd, 3rd;
Number – Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl);
Morphological types – strong and weak, preterite present(12), anomalous (4)
Principal parts: infinitive, past sing, past pl, Participle 2
- Non-finite=infin.:
Case – Nominative (Nom) and Dative (Dat)e.g. Nom beran (uninflected) – Dat to berenne (inflected, indicated direction or purpose); Participles 1, 2 resembled the Verb, the Noun and the Adjective and had the following categories:
Tense – Present (Participle 1) and Past (Participle 2);
Number – Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl);
Gender – Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N);
Case – Nominative (Nom), Genitive (Gen), Dative (Dat), Accusative (Acc);
Voice – Active (Part. 1, 2) and Passive (Part 2).
Preterite ['pret(ə)rɪt] - Present Verbs
There were 12 of these verbs and most of them later turned into Modal Verbs.
Anomalous Verbs
They were irregular verbs that combined the features of the weak and strong verbs. There were 4 of them – willan (will), bēon (to be), ζān (to go), dōn (to do).
GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES OF THE FINITE VERB
The verb-predicate agreed with the subject of the sentence in two grammatical categories: number and person. Its specifically verbal categories were mood and tense.
Finite forms: sg and pl. The category of Person was made up of three forms: the 1st, 2nd,3rd. Person was shown only in the Pres. Tense of the Ind. Mood sg. In the Past Tense sg of the Ind. Mood of the forms of the 1st and 3rd p. coincided, only the 2nd p. had a distinct form. Person was not distinguished in the pl; nor in the Subj. Mood,
Mood was constituted by the Indicative, Imperative and Subjunctive. Subj. did not differ from the Ind. in the 1st p. sg Pres. Tense — bere, deme — and in the 1st and 3rd p. in the Past.
Tense in OE consisted of two forms. Pres. and Past.
The meanings of the tense forms were very general, as compared with present-day English. The forms of the Pres. were used to indicate present and future actions. Future actions could also be expressed by verb phrases with modal verbs.
The Past tense was used in a most general sense to indicate various events in the past.
The category of voice in OE is another debatable issue.. The passive meaning was frequently indicated with the help of Participle 2 of transitive verbs used as predicatives with the verbs bion (NE be) and weorftan 'become” During the OE period these constructions were gradually transformed into the analytical forms of the Passive voice.
MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF VERBS
Most forms of OE verbs were distinguished with the help of inflectional endings or grammatical suffixes; one form — Participle II — was sometimes marked by a prefix; many verbs made use of vowel interchanges in the root; some verbs used consonant interchanges and a few had suppJefive forms. The majority of OE verbs fell into two great divisions: the strong verbs and the weak verbs. Besides these two main groups there were a few verbs which could be put together as "minor" groups. The main difference between the strong and weak verbs lay in the means of forming the principal parts, or the "stems" of the verb. There were also a few other differences in the conjugations.(stron vocalic stems, weak - consonantal)
All the forms of the verb, finite as well as non-finite, were derived from a set of "stems" or principal parts of the verb: the Present tense stem was used in all the Present tense forms. Indicative, Imperative and Subjunctive, and also in the Present Participle and the Infinitive; it is usually shown as the form of the Infinitive; all the forms of the Past tense were derived from the Past tense stems; the Past Participle had a separate stem.
