Table 9

1. Some verbs had a narrowed vowel in the 2^nd and 3^rd p. sg Pres. Tense Ind. Mood due to PG mutation.

The meanings of the tense forms were also very general, as compared with later ages and with present-day English. The forms of the Pres. were used to indicate present and future actions. With verbs of perfective meaning or with adverbs of future time the Pres. acquired the meaning of futurity; Cf.:

tense ealdiʒe indicates a process in the present which is now expressed by the Continuous form. Future happenings 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 (including those which are nowadays expressed by the forms of the Past Continuous, Past Perfect, Present Perfect and other analytical forms). Additional shades of meaning could be attached to it in different contexts, e, g.:

The existence of the four grammatical categories described above is confirmed by consistent opposition of form and meaning. In addition to these categories we must mention two debatable categories: Aspect and Voice.

Until recently it was believed that in OE – as well as in other OG languages – the category of aspect was expressed by the regular con­trast of verbs with and without the prefix e-; verbs with the prefix had a perfective meaning while the same verbs without the prefix indicated a non-completed action, e.g. OE feohtan – efeohtan 'fight'- – 'gain by fighting', līcian – elīcian ‘like’– 'come to like' (cf. R: нравиться – понравиться). In some recent explorations, however, it has been shown that the prefix e- in OE can hardly be regarded as a marker of aspect, it could change the aspective meaning of the verb by making it perfective, but it could also change its lexical meaning, cf. OE sittan – esittan 'sit' – ‘occupy’, beran – eberan ‘carry’ - 'bear a child'. It has also been noticed that verbs without a prefix could sometimes have a perfective meaning: sippan Wiðer yld l e 'since Withergild fell', while verbs with re- would indicate a non-completed repeated action: mani oft ecw eð 'many (people) often said'. It follows that the prefix e- should rather be regarded as an element of word-building, a derivational prefix of vague general meaning, though its ties with certain shades of aspective meaning are obvious.

It is important to note that in OE texts there were also other means of expressing aspective meanings: – verb phrases made up of the verbs habban, bēon, weorðan (NE have, be, 'become') and the Past or Present Participle. The phrases with Participle I were used to describe a pro­longed state or action, the phrases with Participle II indicated a state resulting from a previous, completed action, e. g.:

These phrases did not form regular oppositions with the simple forms of the verb and cannot be treated as members of grammatical categories. They belonged to the periphery of the verb system and provided a sup­ply of phrases which was later used for further extension of the system.

The category of voice in OE is another debatable issue. In OE texts we find a few isolated relics of synthetic Mediopassive forms (which may have existed in PG and were well developed in Gothic). Cf. the old Mediopassive ‘the river that is called Arax’ with the active use of the same verb:'those deer they called reindeer'. The passive meaning was frequently indicated with the help of Participle II of transitive verbs used as predicatives with the verbs bēon (NE be) and weorðan 'become':

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