Table 7

and also when the adjective formed a part of a direct address:

Some adjectives, however, did not conform with these rules: a few adjectives were always declined strong, e. g. eall, mani, oper (NE a, many, other), while several others were always weak: adjectives in the superlative and comparative degrees, ordinal numerals, the adjective ilca ‘ same’. Despite these instances of fixed, unmotivated usage, there existed a certain semantic contrast between the strong and weak forms: the strong forms were associated with the meaning of indefiniteness (rough­ly corresponding to the meaning of the modern indefinite article), the weak forms – with the meaning of "definiteness" (corresponding to the meaning of the definite article). Therefore the weak forms were regular­ly used together with demonstrative pronouns. The formal and semantic opposition between the two declensions of adjectives is regarded by some historians as a grammatical category which can be named "the category of definiteness/indefiniteness" (A.I. Smirnitsky).

It follows that potentially OE adjectives could distinguish up to sixty forms. In reality they distinguished only eleven. Homonymy of forms in the adjec­tive paradigms was three times as high as in the noun. It affected the grammatical categories of the adjective to a varying degree.

Neutralisation of formal oppositions reached the highest level in the category of gender: gender distinctions were practically non-existent in the pl, they were lost in most cases of the weak declension in the sg; in the strong declension Neut. and Masc. forms of adjectives were almost alike.

Formal distinction of number, case and the strong and weak forms was more consistent. As seen from Table 7, number and case were well distinguished in the strong declension, with only a few instances of neutralisation; the distinction of number was lost only in the Dat. case, Masc. and Neut. Cf.:

The forms in the weak declension were less distinctive, as thirteen forms out of twenty ended in - an.

The formal difference between strong and weak forms was shown in all cases and both numbers, the only homonymous forms being Dat. pl and Gen. pl, – if it took the ending - ra.

In later OE the distinction of forms in the adjective paradigm became even more blurred, the Instr. case fell together with the Dat. Numerous variant forms with phonetically reduced endings or with markers borrowed from other forms through analogy impaired the distinction of categorial forms.

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