Grammatical Categories of the Finite Verb

THE VERB

The OE verb was characterised by many peculiar features. Though the verb had few grammatical categories, its paradigm had a 107 very complicated structure: verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and employed a variety of form-building means. All the forms of the verb were synthetic, as analytical forms were only beginning to appear. The non-finite forms had little in common with the finite forms but shared many features with the nominal parts of speech.

The verb-predicate agreed with the subject of the sentence in two grammatical categories: number and person. Its specifically verbal categories were mood and tense. Thus in OE hē bindep ‘he binds’ the verb is in the 3rd p. sg, Pres. Tense Ind. Mood; in the sentence Brinʒap mē hider pā ‘Bring me those (loaves)’ brinʒap is in the Imper. Mood pl.

Finite forms regularly distinguished between two numbers: sg and pl. The homonymy of forms in the verb paradigm did not affect number distinctions: opposition through number was never neutralised (see the conjugations in Table 9).

The category of Person was made up of three forms: the 1st, the 2nd and the 3rd. Unlike number, person distinctions were neutralised in many positions. Person was consistently shown only in the Pres. Tense of the Ind. Mood sg. In the Past Tense sg of the Ind. Mood the forms of the 1st and 3rd p. coincided and only the 2nd p. had a distinct form. Per­son was not distinguished in the pl; nor was it shown in the Subj. Mood.

The category of Mood was constituted by the Indicative, Imperative and Subjunctive. As can be seen from the paradigms in Table 9 there were a few homonymous forms which eliminated the distinction between the moods: Subj. did not differ from the Ind. in the 1st p. sg Pres. Tense – bere, dēme – and in the 1st and 3rd p. in the Past. The coincidence of the Imper. and Ind. Moods is seen in the pl – lōciap, dēmap.

The category of Tense in OE consisted of two categorial forms, Pres. and Past. The tenses were formally distinguished by all the verbs in the Ind. and Subj. Moods, there being practically no instances of neutrali­sation of the tense opposition.

In order to understand the structure of the verb system one should get acquainted with the meanings and use of moods and tenses in OE.

The use of the Subj. Mood in OE was in many respects different from its use in later ages. Subj. forms conveyed a very general meaning of unreality or supposition. In addition to its use in conditional sentences and other volitional, conjectural and hypothetical contexts Subj. was common in other types of construction: in clauses of time, clauses of result and in clauses presenting reported speech, e. g.:

pā īet hē ascode hwæt heora cynin hāten w æ re, and him man and-swarode and cwæð pæt hē Ælle hāten w æ re ‘ and yet he asked what their king was called, and they answered and said that he was called Ælle’. In presenting indirect speech usage was variable: Ind. forms occurred by the side of Subj. 109

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