Grammatical Categories of the Verbals

In OE there were two non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the Participle. In many respects they were closer to the nouns and adjectives than to the finite verb; their nominal features were far more obvious than their verbal features, especially at the morphological level. The verbal nature of the Infinitive and the Participle was revealed in some of their functions and in their syntactic “combinability”: like finite forms they could take direct objects and be modified by adverbs.

The Infinitive had no verbal grammatical categories. Being a verbal noun by origin, it had a sort of reduced case-system: two forms which roughly corresponded to the Nom. and the Dat. cases of nouns –

Like the Dat. case of nouns the inflected Infinitive with the preposition tō could be used to indicate the direction or purpose of art action, e.g.:

The uninflected Infinitive was used in verb phrases with modal verbs or other verbs of incomplete predication, e. g.:

The Participle was a kind of verbal adjective which was characterised not only by nominal but also by certain verbal features. Participle I (Present Participle) was opposed to Participle II (Past Participle) through voice and tense distinctions: it was active and expressed 112 present or simultaneous processes and qualities, while Participle II ex­pressed states and qualities resulting from past action and was contrast­ed to Participle I as passive to active, if the verb was transitive. Parti­ciple II of intransitive verbs had an active meaning; it indicated a past action and was opposed to Participle I only through tense. The trans­lations of the Participles in Table 10 explain the meanings of the forms (for the forms of Participles see also Table 9).

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