C) Strong Verbs and Their Peculiarities

B) Morphological Classification of OE Verbs.

The conjugation of verbs shows the means of form building used in the OE verb system. Most forms 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 used consonant interchanges and a few had superlative forms.

The majority of OE verbs fell into two great divisions: the strong verbs and the weak verbs. Besides them there were a few verbs that 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 verbs.

All the forms of the verbs were derived from a set of “stems” or principal parts of the verb: the Present tense stem was used in all Present tense forms, Indicative, Imperative and Subjunctive and also in the Present Participle and the Infinitive.

The strong verbs formed their stems by means of vowel gradation and by adding certain suffixes; in some verbs it was accompanied by consonant interchanges. The strong verbs had four stems, as they distinguished two stems in the Past tense - one for the 1st and 3rd p. sg Ind. Mood, the other - for the other Past tense forms, Ind. and Subj.

The weak verbs derived their Past tense stem and the stem of Participle II from the Present tense stem with the help of the dental suffix -d- or -t-; normally they did not change their root vowel, but in some verbs suffixation was accompanied by some vowel interchange.

Both the strong and the weak verbs are further subdivided into a number of morphological classes with some modifications in the main form-building devices.

Minor groups of verbs differed from the weak and strong verbs but were not homogeneous either. Some of them combined certain features of the strong and weak verbs in a peculiar way; others were suppletive or altogether anomalous. The following chart gives a general idea of the morphological classification of OE verbs.

Table 5

Morphological classification of OE verbs

Strong	Weak	Minor groups
Seven classes with different gradation series	Three classes with different stem-suffixes	Preterite-presents Suppletive Anomalous

There were about three hundred strong verbs in OE. They were native words descending from PG with parallels in other OG languages; many of them had a high frequency of occurrence and were basic items of the vocabulary widely used in word derivation and word compounding.

The strong verbs in OE are usually divided into seven classes.

Classes from 1 to 6 use vowel gradation which goes back to the IE ablaut-series modified in different phonetic conditions in accordance with PG and early OE sound changes. Class 7 includes reduplicating verbs, which originally built their past forms by means of repeating the root-morpheme; this doubled root gave rise to a specific kind of root-vowel interchange.

The principle forms of all the strong verbs have the same endings irrespective of the class: -an for the Infinitive, no ending in the Past sg stem, -on in the form of Past pl, -en for Participle II.

Two of these markers - the zero ending in the second stem and - en in Participle II - are found in strong verbs and should be noted as their specific characteristics. The classes differ in the series of root-vowels used to distinguish the four stems. However, only several classes and subclasses make a distinction between four vowels as markers of the four stems; some classes distinguish only three grades of ablaut and consequently have the same root vowel in two stems out of four; two classes, 6 and 7, use only two vowels in their gradation series.

In addition to vowel gradation some verbs with the root ending in -s, -p or -f employed as interchange of consonants: [s ~ z ~ r]; [f ~ v] and [θ ~ ð ~ d]. These interchanges were either instances of positional variation of fricative consonants in OE or relics of earlier positional sound changes; they were of no significance as grammatical markers and disappeared due to levelling by analogy towards the end of OE.

Table 6

Strong verbs in OE

Principal forms Classes	Infinitive	Past Singular	Past Plural	Participle II	NE
	wrītan	wrāt	writon	writen	write
	cēosan	cēas	curon	coren	choose
	findan	fand	fundon	funden	find
	beran	bær	bǽron	boren	bear
	sittan	sæt	sǽton	seten	sit
	scacan	scōc	scōcon	scacen	shake
	3rōwan	3rēow	3rēowon	3rōwen	grow

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