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Germanic Ablaut




Qualitative gradation quantitative gradation

Lecture 6

DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Verbal Parts

Outline:

I. Indo-European verb-system

II.. OE Verb:

1) grammatical categories:

a) Person & Number;

b) Mood;

c) Tense;

d) Aspect;

e) Voice;

2) morphological classification of OE Verbs:

a) strong verbs;

b) weak verbs;

c) preterite-present;

d) irregular;

III. Verb in Middle and Early New English:

1) strong verbs

2) weak verbs

3) other classes

4) development of analytical constructions

5) categories

IV. Adverb. Degrees of comparison.

 

I. Indo-European verb-system. The verb in IE is one of the oldest parts of speech. Therefore the development of the verb in any IE languages can be understood only if the old IE verb-system and its peculiarities are taken into account.

The IE verb-stem had the following structure: consonant-vowel-consonant. The soundingof the vowel in the root was dependent on the conditions of the stress falling upon it. This vowel-variation, termed Ablaut, was primarily a phonetic process in IE. In Germanic languages it was widely employed as a grammatical means. The root-vowel could either change its quality (qualitative Ablaut), or its quantity/length (quantitative Ablaut).

 

Indo-European Ablaut: possible changes of sounding

Qualitative gradation: Quantitative gradation:

o – fully stressed vowel (full grade) ō – prolonged grade

e – weakly stressed vowel (reduced grade) o – full grade

zero – unstressed vowel (zero grade) zero – (zero grade)

 

IE gradation was first widely used in the category of aspect which represented actions as completed/non-completed, repeated, etc. In IE there existed many aspect forms: the durative, the perfective, and the momentary aspects. Each of these were characterized by a certain grade of the root-vowel. So, in IE there were the following vowel grades for different aspect forms:

 

Durative e (reduced grade) o (full grade)

Perfective o (full grade) ō (prolonged grade)

Momentary zero (zero grade) ō (prolonged grade)

 

In the course of time both sounding and the grammatical meaning of these forms changed:

1) the changes in sounding took place in accordance with the Germanic Vowel Shift: IE e > Germ. e/i, IE o > Germ. a. Thus, in Germanic languages Ablaut was the following:

 

 

Qualitative gradation: Quantitative gradation:

a – fully stressed vowel (full grade) ō – prolonged grade

e/i – weakly stressed vowel (reduced grade) a – full grade

zero – unstressed vowel (zero grade) zero – (zero grade)

 

2) grammatically, the aspects changed into tenses, that is the categories expressing the time of the action in its relation to the time of the utterance.

Though the IE tonic (musical) stress, which caused gradation, was replaced in Germanic by expiratory one, the primary verbs with Ablaut as a grammatical means survived in English (drink-drank-drunk).

The most prominent feature of the Germanic verb-system is a special type of the past with the dental suffix – d/t. Verbs that formed their past by adding this suffix, came to be termed weak verbs. In subsequent centuries weak verbs in the Germanic languages have been on the constant increase (with the newly appeared and borrowed verbs), while the number of the so-called strong verbs gradually diminished.

 

II.. OE Verb:

Grammatical categories:

OE Verb was characterized by many specific features. Though it had few grammatical categories its paradigm had a very complicated structure: verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and used a lot of means of form-building. All these forms were synthetic with some analytical elements to appear. The non-finite forms had a little in common with finite verbs, but much – with nominal parts.

1) OE verbs distinguished the following grammatical categories: person, number, mood, tense, aspect and voice.

a) The verb-predicate agreed with the subject in number and person: sing./pl. and 1, 2, 3 persons accordingly. The homonymy of forms didn’t affect number distinctions, they were not neutralized. Unlike number, person distinctions were neutralized in many positions. Person was shown only in the Present, Indicative Mood, sing. form. But in the Past, singular, Indicative Mood the forms of the 1 and 2 persons coincided. In the plural and in the Subjunctive Mood person was not distinguished.

b) The category of mood included 3 members: Indicative, Imperative and Subjunctive. There was not a clear distinction between moods, for there existed several homonymous forms (e.g. Subj. sing. and Indic. 1st, sing.). The Indicative was used to state an action as a real fact. The Imperative expressed order or request (to the 2nd pers.), sometimes – wish. The Subjunctive expressed an action which is supposed, both in the main and subordinate clauses. It was a very general meaning of unreality or supposition. In addition to its use in conditional or volitional clauses, Subj. was also common in clauses of time, result and in indirect speech.

c) The category of tense in OE consisted of 2 categorial forms: Present and Past, and was expressed by synthetic means. The forms of the Pres. were used to indicate both present and future actions. The meaning of futurity could be expressed by verbs of perfective meaning, or phrases with modal meaning. The Past was used to indicate various events in the past (including ModE Past.Cont., Past Perf., Pres.Perf.).

d) As for the category of aspect, it is disputable problem: if there was aspect in OE? How was it expressed? There is a view that aspect was expressed by the opposition of verbs with/without prefix z e (with perfective or non-perfective meaning accordingly). But it didn’t always work. Recent researches show that z e can not be regarded as a marker of aspect. It could make the verb perfective, but also could change its lexical meaning (e.g. OE sittan “sit” – z esittan “occupy”, beran “carry” z eberan “bear a child”).

Also the verbs without z e could express a perfective meaning. So, prefix z e might be regarded as a derivational prefix with some shades of aspective meaning. Aspect in OE also could be expressed through verb-phrases with “ habban, bēon, weorðan” and Participle II.

e) The category of voice also existed in OE in the form of synthetic Mediopassive (which existed in Proto-Germanic and was well developed in Gothic). But the most frequent expression of Passive was the combination of Participle II of transitive verbs plus the verbs “ bēon” and ” weorðan”.

 

2) Morphological classification of OE Verbs:

The majority of OE verbs fell into 2 great divisions: strong and weak. Also there were verbs which fell into minor groups: preterite-present (combined the features of both strong and weak verbs), and irregular (anomalous). The main difference between strong and weak verbs was the way of forming the Past and Participle II forms (strong imployed Ablaut, weak – suffix –d/t).

 

a) OE strong verbs (about 3 hundred) distinguished 4 main stems (Infinitive, Past Singular, Past Plural, Participle II), and were divided into 7 classes. Classes 1-6 used Ablaut to form Past and Part.II. Class 7 included reduplicated verbs (by repeating root-morpheme), and some other stem-vowels. In some verbs consonant interchange is found (according to Verner’s law). The rows of ablaut of OE verbs are the following:

I class: ī – ā – i – i (wrītan – wrāt – writon - writen)

II class: ēo – ēa – u – o (cēosan – cēas – curon – coren)

III class: i – a/o – u – u /before nasal cons./ (drincan – dranc – druncon – drunken)

/before “l+cons.” / e – ea – u – o (helpan – healp – hulpon – holpen)

/before “r+cons.”, “h+cons”/ eo – ea – u – o (steorfan – stearf – sturfon – storfen)

IV class: /before “l, r”/ e – æ – æ – o (stelan – stæl – stælon – stolen)

V class: e – æ – æ – e (tredan – træd – trædon – treden)

VI class: a – ō – ō – a (faran – fōr – fōron – faren)

VII class: (hatan – het – heton – haten)

As you see, all strong verbs have the same form-endings: - an for Infinitive, no ending in the Past sing., - on for the Past pl., - en for Part.II. Zero ending for Past sing. and - en for Part.II are specific only of strong verbs.

 

b) There were 3 classes of weak verbs in OE corresponding to 3 classes of such in Gothic. The 4th Gothic class is not found in other Germanic languages. The class of weak verbs was more numerous than that of strong verbs. All newly appeared and borrowed verbs became weak. This group of verbs formed their Past and Part.II by means of the dental suffix -d/t-. The 3 classes of weak verbs differed in the ending of the infinitive (- an – 1 Class, - ian – 2 Class, - an – 3 Class) and the suffix (-i/j- – 1 Class, -ō/ōj- – 2 Class, PG - ai - – 3 Class). The 3rd Class is the mixture of PG 3rd and 4th Classes). The first class fell into 2 groups: regular and irregular.

I class:

Regular weak verbs – (Inf.) deman – (Past) demde – (Part.II) demed (- d becomes - t after a voiceless cons.)

Irregular weak verbs – (Inf) sellan – (Past) sealed – (Part.II) seald

II class:

(Inf) macian – (Past) macode – (Part.II) macod

III class:

(Inf) habban – (Past) hæfde – (Part.II) hæfd

c) Preterite-present verbs belonged to so-called “minor” group. They have so strange a name, for originally the Pres. tense forms of these verbs were Past tense forms of strong verbs, but their Past tense forms derived from the Past tense forms of the weak verbs. In OE there were 12 such verbs. Six of them survived in ModE. They were united by common lexical meaning: the attitude of the speaker towards the reality, in ModE they are modal verbs (āg “ought”, cunnan “can”, sculan “shall”, magan “may”, mōt “must”). Infinitive and Participle II, if found, were formed from the Plural-Present-stem. According to ablaut, 5 main forms, like in Gothic, were distinguished:

(Pres.Sg.) can – (Pres.Pl.) cunno – (Past Sg.) cuðe – (Part.II) cunnen – (Inf) cunnan

In the paradigm of conjunction OE preterite-present verbs had no inflexion in the 3rd person Singular. It explains the fact why Modern modal verbs don’t have ending –s in the 3rd person Singular..

 

d) There were a few OE verbs with irregular forms, which derived from different roots, i.e. they are suppletive (e.g., OE tō gān “to go”, tō dōn “to do”, tō willan “will”, and tō bēon “to be ”). The last one is ancient and goes back to Indo-European domain (Compare; Ukr.: є – бути). In OE the verb tō bēon had 2 forms of the Infinitive used in parallel – bēon/wesan. That is why there is a twofold system of Present Tense and 2 forms of Participle I. There was no Participle II of this verb in OE.




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