Parts of Speech and Grammatical Categories

Лекция 3

Old English consonant system

Place of articulation     Manner of articulation	Labial, labiodental	Forelingual (dental)	Mediolingual (palatal)	Back lingual (velar)
Noise Consonants	plosive voiceless voiced	p p: b b:	t t: d d:	k’ k’: g’:	k k: g g:
fricative voiceless voiced	f f: v	Ө Ө: s s: ð z	x’ x’: γ’ (j)	x x: (h) γ
Sonorants	m m: w	n n: r l	j	(ŋ)

The OE system of consonants of the 9th and 10th c. consisted of several correlated sets of consonants. All the consonants fell into noise consonants and sonorants. The noise consonants were subdivided into plosives and fricatives; plosives were further differentiated as voiced and voiceless, the difference being phonemic. The fricative consonants were also subdivided into voiced and voiceless; in this set, however, sonority was merely a phonemic difference between allophones. Cf. OE pin-bin, where the difference in sonority is phonemically relevant ‘pin, bin’ and OE hlāf [f] – hlāford [v] where the difference is positional: the consonant is voiced intervocally and voiceless finally. The opposition of palatal and velar consonants [k] – [k’], [g] – [g’] had probably become phonemic by the time of the earliest written records.

Some scholars include in the system one more palatal consonant: [sk’], spelt as sc (OE scip ‘ship’); others treat it as a sequence of two sounds [s’] and [k’] until Early ME when they fused into a single sibilant [ʃ].

The most universal distinctive feature in the consonant system was the difference in length. During the entire OE period long consonants are believed to have been opposed to short ones on a phonemic level; they were mostly distinguished in intervocal position. Single and geminated (long) consonants are found in identical phonetic conditions. In final position the quantitative opposition was irrelevant and the second letter, which would indicate length, was often lacking: OE man and eal are identical to mann, eall ‘man, all’.

OE was a synthetic, or inflected, type of language; it showed the relations between words and expressed other grammatical meanings mainly with the help of simple grammatical forms. In building grammatical forms OE employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges, grammatical prefixes, and suppletive suh-plee-tiv formation. The history of English has seen the gradual substitution of a predominantly analytical structure for an original synthetical one.

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

The history of English morphology has been the one of progressive simplification. Although the OE inflectional system is complicated in comparison with that of today, there is evidence that it represents a simplification of a much more complex system of inflections in the parent language, and it is simpler than the inflectional systems of Greek and Latin.

The parts of speech to be distinguished in OE are as follows: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral, the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection. Inflected parts of speech possessed certain 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.

In general it can be said that the changes toward simplification have proceeded at different speeds in the various parts of speech. The nominal parts of speech have undergone relatively greater changes than the verb. It should also be pointed out that although the verb has lost most of its inflections, the tense system of the MoE verb has actually become much more complex than that in OE.

The OE grammatical system is described synchronically as appearing in the texts of the 9^th and the 10^th c.

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