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Verbals in the history of English





In OE there were two non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the Participle. In many respects they were closer to the nouns and adjectives than to the finite verb; their nominal features were far more obvious than their verbal features, especially at the morphological level. The verbal nature of the Infinitive and the Participle was revealed in some of their functions and in their syntactic "combinability": like finite forms they could take direct objects and be modified by adverbs.

The Infinitive had no verbal grammatical categories- Being a verbal noun by origin, it had a sort of reduced case-system: two forms which roughly corresponded to the Nom. and the Dat. cases of nouns Like the Dat. case of nouns the inflected Infinitive with the preposition to could be used to indicate the direction or purpose of an action.

The Participle was a kind of verbal adjective which was characterized not only by nominal but also by certain verbal features. Participle 1 (Present Participle) was opposed to Participle II {Past Participle) through voice and tense distinctions: it was active and expressed present or simultaneous processes and qualities, while Participle II expressed slates and qualities resulting from past action and was contrasted Jo Participle 1 as passive to active, if the verb was transitive. Participle II of intransitive verbs had an active meaning; it indicated a past action and was opposed to Participle I only through tense.

The forms of the two participles were strictly differentiated. Participle 1 was formed from the Present tense stem (the Infinitive without the endings -an, -ion) with the help of the suffix -ende. Participle II had a stem of Its own — in strong verbs it was marked by a certain grade of the root-vowel interchange and by the suffix -en; with weak verbs it ended in -dl-t Participle 11 was commonly marked by the prefix 3e-, though it could also occur without it, especially if the verb had other word-building prefixes.

Participles were employed predicalively and attributively like adjectives and shared their grammatical categories: they were declined as weak and strong and agreed with nouns in number, gender and case.

The main trends of their evolution in ME and NE can be defined as gradual loss of most nominal features (except syntactical functions) and growth of verbal features. The simplifying changes in the verb paradigm, and the decay of the OE inflectional system account for the first of these trends — loss of case distinctions in the infinitive and of forms of agreement in the Participles.

The Infinitive lost its inflected form (the so-called "Dat. case") in Early ME. The preposition to, which was placed to show direction or purpose, lost its prepositional force and changed into a formal sign of the Infinitive. In ME the Infinitive with to does not necessarily express purpose. In order to reinforce the meaning of purpose another preposition, for, was sometimes placed before the inf, but it was lost in early NE.

The distinctions between the two participles were preserved in ME and NE: Participle I had an active meaning and expressed a process or quality simultaneous with the events described by the predicate of the sentence. Par-ticiple II had an active or passive meaning depending on the transitivity of the verb, and expressed a preceding action or its results in the subsequent situation. Participle I coincided with the verbal noun, which was formed in OE with the help of the suffixes -ung and -ing, but had preserved only one suffix, -ing, in ME. In OE Participle 1 was considered Present Participle, had only the form of the Active Voice, possessed the categories of Number, Gender, Case. It was used predicatively and attributively (agreed with the noun in Number, Gender, Case).

In ME it lost its nominal and adjectival features together with the categories of Number, Gender, Case and became unchangeable. In OE P1 had 1 form and in ME there were 4 forms.

Development of the Gerund

The Late ME (14-15c) period witnessed the growth of a new verbal known in modern grammars as the Gerund. The gerund can be traced to three sources; on the basis of verbal noun, but the article and the prepositions were lost and it gained some verbal features like a direct object -J. as well as the frequent absence of article before the ing-form functioning as a noun. Those were the verbal features of the Gerund. The nominal features, retained from the verbal noun, were its syntactic functions and the ability to he modified by a possessive pronoun or a noun in the Gen. case

In the course of time the sphere cf the usage of the Gerund grew: it replaced the Infinitive and the Participle in many adverbial functions; its great advantage was that it could be used with various prepositions It took direct object (verbal feature) (e.g. buying a book); It could be preceded by an article or a possessive pronoun

27.OE SYNTAX

OE was largely a synthetic language; it possessed a system of grammatical forms which could indicate the connection between words; consequently, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple; complicated syntactical constructions were rare.

The Phrase. Noun, Adjective and Verb Patterns

The syntactic structure of a language can be described at the level of the phrase and at the level of the sentence. In OE texts we find a variety of word phrases (also: word groups or patterns). OE noun patterns, adjective patterns and verb patterns had certain specific features which are important to note in view of their later changes.

A noun pattern consisted of a noun as the head word and pronouns, adjectives (including verbal adjectives, or participles), numerals and other nouns as determiners and attributes. Most noun modifiers agreed with the noun in gender, number and case, Infinitives and participles were often used in verb phrases

The Simple Sentence

The structure of the OE sentence can be described in terms of Mod E syntactic analysis, for the sentence was made up of the same parts, except that those parts were usually simpler. Attributive groups were short and among the parts of the sentence there were very few predicative constructions ("syntactical complexes"). Absolute constructions with the noun in the Dat. case were sometimes used in translations from Latin in imitation oF the Latin Dativus Absolutus. The objective predicative construction "Accusative with the Infinitive" occurred in original OE texts:

The connection between the parts of the sentence was shown by the form of the words as they had formal markers for gender, case, number and Person. As compared with later periods agreement and government played an important role in the word phrase and in the sentence. Accordingly the place of the word in relation to other words was of secondary importance and the order of words was relatively free

The presence of formal markers made it possible to miss out some parts of the sentence which would be obligatory in an English sentence now. In the following instance the subject is not repeated but the form of the predicate shows that the action is performed by the same person as the preceding action:

One of the conspicuous features of OE syntax was multiple negation within a single sentence or clause. The most common negative particle was ne, which was placed before the verb; it was often accompanied by other negative words, mostly naht or noht {which had developed from ne plus d-wikt 'no thing'). These words reinforced the meaning of negation:

Another peculiarity of OE negation was that the particle ne could be attached to some verbs, pronouns and adverbs to form single words:

Compound and Complex Sentences. Connectives

Compound and complex sentences existed in the English language since the earliest times. Even in the oldest texts we find numerous instances of coordination and subordination and a large inventory of subordinate clauses, subject clauses, object clauses, attributive clauses,

Coordinate clauses were mostly Joined by and, a conjunction of a most general meaning, which could connect statements with various semantic relations.

Repetition of connectives at the head of each clause (termed "correlation") was common in complex sentences:

Attributive clauses were joined to the principal clauses by means of various connectives, there being no special class of relative pronouns. The main connective was the indeclinable particle pe employed either alone or together with demonstrative and personal pronouns:

The pronouns could also be used to join the clauses without the particle pe:

 

30.Word Order

The order of words in the OE sentence was relatively free. The position of words in the sentence was often determined by logical and stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints.

The order of words could depend on the communicative type of the sentence — question versus statement, on the type of clause, on the presence and place of some secondary parts of the sentence.

Inversion was used for grammatical purposes in questions; full inversion with simple predicates and partial — with compound predicates, containing link-verbs and modal verbs:

A peculiar type of word order is found in many subordinate and in some coordinate clauses: the clause begins with the subject following 'be connective, and ends with the predicate or its finite part, all the secondary parts being enclosed between them

Different types of word order couid be used in similar syntactical conditions. It appears that in many respects OE syntax was characterised by a wide range of variation and by the co-existence of various, sometimes even opposing, tendencies

 

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