OE Grammar (General Survey)

OE GRAMMAR

Lecture 4

OE was a synthetic or inflected type of the language: it showed the relations between words and expressed other grammatical meanings mainly with the help of simple (synthetic) grammatical forms. In building grammatical forms OE employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root, grammatical prefixes, and suppletive formation.

Grammatical endings (or inflections) were 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.

Sound interchanges were employed on a more limited scale and were often combined with other form-building means; especially endings. Vowel interchanges were more common than interchanges of consonants.

The use of prefixes in grammatical forms was rare and was confined to verbs. Suppletive forms were restricted to several pronouns, a few adjectives and a couple of verbs.

OE had a rather developed system of parts of speech. Inflected parts of speech (the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral, the verb) 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.

There were five nominal grammatical categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison, and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness. Each part of speech had its own peculiarities in the inventory of categories and the number of members within the category (categorial forms). The noun had only two grammatical categories proper: number and case. The adjective had the maximum number of categories - five. The number of members in the same grammatical categories in different parts of speech did not necessarily coincide: thus the noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative, whereas the adjective had five (the same four cases plus the Instrumental case). Perhaps in the pre-written period the noun had five cases, since cases of adjectives depend on the cases of nouns. This supposition is confirmed by several instances of specific Instrumental noun-endings in the earliest texts. The personal pronouns of the 1^st and 2^nd p., unlike other parts of speech, distinguished three numbers –– Singular, Plural and Dual. Verbal grammatical categories were not numerous: tense and mood-verbal categories proper and number and person, showing agreement between the verb-predicate and the subject of the sentence. The distinction of categorial forms by the noun and the verb was to a large extent determined by their division into morphological classes: declensions and conjugations.

2. The OE Nouns:

a) Grammatical Categories.

The OE noun had 2 grammatical categories: number and case. In addition, nouns distinguished 3 genders, but this distinction was not a grammatical category; it was merely a classifying feature accounting, alongside other features, for the division of nouns into morphological classes.

The category of number consisted of 2 members, singular and plural. The noun had 4 cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative.

b) Morphological Classification of the Nouns (system of declension).

The most remarkable feature of OE nouns was their elaborate system of declensions, which was a sort of morphological classification. The total number of declensions, including both the major and minor types, exceeded 25. All in all there were only 10 distinct endings (plus some phonetic variants of these endings) and a few root-vowel interchanges used in the noun paradigms.

In the first place, the morphological classification of OE nouns rested upon the most ancient (IE) grouping of nouns according to the stem-suffixes. Stem-suffixes could consist of vowels (vocalic stems), of consonants (consonantal stems), of sound sequences. Some groups of nouns had no stem-forming suffix or had a "zero" suffix; they are usually termed "root-stems" and are grouped together with consonantal stems.

OE nouns distinguished 3 genders: Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Gender in OE was not always associated with the meaning of nouns: e.g. wīf - "woman" (Neut.); wīfman - "woman" (Masc.).

In OE gender was primarily a grammatical distinction; Masc., Fem. and Neut. nouns could have different forms, even if they belonged to the same stem (type of declension).

Other reasons accounting for the division into declensions were structural and phonetic: monosyllabic nouns had certain peculiarities as compared to polysyllabic; monosyllabic with a long-root syllable (that is, containing a long vowel + a consonant or a short vowel + 2 consonants – also called "long-stemmed" nouns) differed in some forms from nouns with a short syllable (short-stemmed nouns).

Morphological Classification of Nouns in OE Table 1

Division according to stem

Vocalic stems Consonantal stems

(strong declension)

a-stems and their variants ja- stems, wa-stems

ō- stems and their variants jō- stems, wo- stems

i-stems

u-stems

n-stems (weak de- clension)

Root-stems

Other minor stems: r-, s-, nd-.

Division according to gender

MN

F

MNF

MF

MNF

MF

MNF

Division according to the length of

the root-syllable

Short long	Short long	Short long	Short long
Singular Nom. scip Gen. scipes Dat. scipe Acc. scip   Plural Nom. scipu Gen. scipa Dat.scipum Acc. Scipu (short-stemmed, Neut.) NE ship	talu tale tale tale     tala (-e) tala (-ena) talum tala (-e) (short-stemmed, Fem.) NE tale	mete metes mete mete     mete(-as) meta metum mete(-as) (short-stemmed, Masc.) NE meat	sunu suna suna sunu     suna suna sunum suna (short-stemmed, Masc.) NE son	nama naman naman naman     naman namena namum naman   (M)   NE name	fōt fōtes fēt fōt     fēt fōta fōtum fēt   (M)   NE foot	fæder fæder(-es) fæder fæder     fæderas fædera fæderum fæderas   (M)   NE father

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