21. Finite and non-finite forms of verbs.

Finite forms of verbs can fulfill the function of predicate while the non-finite can not.The OE verbal system included finite forms of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd persons, singular and plural; and non-finite forms: participle I and II as well the infinitive. There were no gerund in OE. 22. The Infinitive and Participle I and II. In OE there were two non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the Participle. 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 beran uninflected Infinitive (Nom. case) t berenne or t beranne inflected Infinitive (Dat. case) Like the Dat. case of nouns the inflected Infinitive with the preposition t could be used to indicate the direction or purpose of an action. The uninflected Infinitive was used in verb phrases with modal verbs or other verbs of incomplete predication. The Participle was a kind of verbal adjective which was characterized 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 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. Participles were employed predicatively and attributively like adjectives and shared their grammatical categories: they were declined as weak and strong and agreed with nouns in number, gender and case.

23.The category of aspect and voice in OE. There were 2 aspects in OE verb: perfective and imperfective. Aspect was a lexical-grammatical category since it was expressed by prefixes, the later being often used for changing the lexical meaning of the verb at the same time, e.g stean-to beat, ofstean-to kill. The prefix in these cases was a word building element. Aspect in OE was unstable as a grammar category. Not all of the verbs possessed it. There were no pairs or correlative form distinguished by aspect. From this point of view it forms with the prefix g-, that express completion of an action, but there were forms without it. Only sometimes this prefix indicated the determination of an action, in a such way approached to the meaning of the perfective aspect. For example the verb coman-to come, never appears with this prefix. Voice as a verbal characteristic was not connected with all the system and was only expressed n in participle II. Participle I active voice, Participle II passive voice. There was no special system of the passive voice in OE, there were combinations of the verbs beon and wassan with participle II. They were nominal predicates. 24. The category of mood. The conjunction of verbs in 3 moods. There were 3 moods in OE: Indicative, Imperative, Subjunctive. The last one was rather often used in OE because it was applied in indirect speech. Only the simple forms of the subjunctive were in existence although Should and Would + infinitive existed. They still kept their lexical meaning , in Middle English they turned in auxiliary verbs. 25. Seven classes of strong verbs, their characteristic features.

Strong verbs. There were about three hundred strong verbs in OE. They formed their stems by means of vowel gradation (ablaut) and by adding certain suffixes.
The classes of strong verbs

Principal Infinitive forms Classes 1 2 3 Wrtan (a) cosan (b) ban (a) findan (b) helpan

Past Singular1

Past Plural

Participle II

NE

wrt cas ba fand healp

writon curon buon fundon hulpon fuhton bron cwdon

writen coren bn

Write choose bow find

funden holpen fohten

help fight

(c) feohtan feaht 4 5 Beran br

boren cweden

Bear say (obs. quoth)

(a) cwean cw

(b) sittan 6 7 Scacan (a) htan

st scc ht (heht)

ston sccon hton (hehton) rowon

seten scacen hten rwen

Sit Shake call, name Grow

(b) rwan row

26. Weak verbs and preterite-present verbs. Supplitive forms of verbs.

Weak verbs.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. The classes of weak verbs. Weak Verbs In Old English Principal forms Infinitive Classes I -an/-ian -de/-ede/-te -ed/-d/-t Past Tense Participle II NE

(a) styrian (b) temman (c) dman (d) cpan (e) tellan (f) yncan II -ian lcian III -an libban habban

styrede teraede dmde cpte tealde hte -ode lcode -de lifde hfde

styred temed dmed cped teald ht -od lcod -d lifd hfd

Stir tame deem keep tell thin

Look

Live have

Class 1: includes regular and irregular verbs.The verbs of the Class I, being i-stems, originally contained the element [-i/-j] between the root and the endings. This caused palatal mutation of the root vowel, and the lengthening of consonants. [-i/-j] was lost in all verbs before the age of writing. Two groups of verbs in Class I types (e) and (f) had an interchange of root-vowels: the Infinitive had a mutated vowel like all the verbs of ClassI, while the other two forms retained the original non-mutated vowel. These verbs are called irregular in Class1 Minor groups of verbs. Preterite-present or past-present verbs. Originally the Present tense forms of these verbs were Past tense forms (or, more precisely, IE perfect forms, denoting past actions for the present). Later these forms acquired a present meaning but preserved many formal features of the Past tense. Most of these verbs had new forms of the Past tense built with the help of the dental suffix. Some of them also acquired the forms of the verbals: Participles and Infinitives; most of the verbs did not have a full paradigm and were in this sense defective. These verbs had noParticiple I; some preterite-presents built Participle I from the Present Tense stem, e. g. OE maon, m, Participle I maende (NE may). In OE there were twelve preterite-present verbs. Most of them did not indicate actions, but expressed a kind of attitude to an action denoted by another verb, an Infinitive of which followed the preterie-present, eventually preterite-present verbs developed into modal verbs. Anomalous verbs had irregular forms. The verb willan had a past tense form wolde. Some verbs combined the features of strong and weak verbs. OE dn had a week Past tense form with a vowel interchange and a Participle in n like strong verbsn: dn dyde edn.Ban-bde-ebn.

Suppletive verbs.Two verbs were suppletive. OE n whose Past tense was built from a different root: n ede en and wesan,bon. The verb bon is an ancient IE suppletive verb. N nmany languages its paradigm is made up oif several roots (R. , ). In Oe the Present tense forms were the modifications of the roots *wes- and *bhu-.The Past tense was built from the root *wesan on the pattern of the strong verbs of the Class 5.

27. The Scandinavian invasion , its influence on the futher development of the English language. English is a Germanic language, as are German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Near the end of the Old English period English underwent a third foreign influence, the result of contact with another important language, the Scandinavian.The age of Vikings, starting around year 750 AD, had an important role in the making of modern Europe. The Scandinavian colonisation of the British Isles had a considerable effect on the English language and vocabulary, as well as culture. There are many hundreds of Scandinavian place-names that can still be found in the British Isles, an endings such as -by, -ness, and -thorp, are some typical Scandinavian place-name elements. The Vikings had a influence on the English language itself, judging by the amount of words that were borrowed and the fact that they are part of everyday vocabulary even today. Scandinavian words that entered the English language included landing, score, beck, fellow, take, busting, and steersman.The vast majority of loan words did not appear in documents until the early 12th century; these included many modern words which used sk- sounds, such as skirt, sky, and skin; other words appearing in written sources at this time included again, awkward, birth, cake, dregs, fog, freckles, gasp, law, moss, neck, ransack, root, scowl, sister, seat, sly, smile, want, weak, and window from Old Norse meaning "wind-eye". Some of the words that came into use are among the most common in English, such as to go, to come, to sit, to listen, to eat, both, same, get, and give. The system of personal pronouns was affected, with they, them, and their replacing the earlier forms. Old Norse influenced the verb to be; the replacement of sindon by are is almost certainly Scandinavian in origin, as is the third-person-singular ending -s in the present tense of verbs. There are more than 1,500 Scandinavian place names in England, mainly in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (within the former boundaries of the Danelaw): over 600 end in -by, the Scandinavian word for "village" or "town" for example Grimsby, Naseby, andWhitby; many others end in -thorpe ("farm"), thwaite ("clearing"), and -toft("homestead"). 28. The 3 subgroups of the Germanic languages. The expansion of English. The Germanic languages today are conventionally divided into three linguistic groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic. This division had begun by the 4th cent. A.D. The East Germanic group, to which such dead languages as Burgundian, Gothic, and Vandalic belong, is now extinct. However, the oldest surviving literary text of any Germanic language is in Gothic . The North Germanic languages, also called Scandinavian languages or Norse, include Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. They are spoken by about 20 million people, chiefly in Denmark, the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. These modern North Germanic languages are all descendants of Old Norse and have several distinctive grammatical features in common. One is the adding of the definite article to the noun as a suffix. Thus "the book" in English is expressed in Swedish as boken, "bookthe" (bok meaning "book" and -en meaning "the"). Also distinctive is a method of forming the passive voice by adding -s to the end of the verb or, in the case of the present tense, by changing the active ending -r to s (-st in Icelandic). This is illustrated by the Swedish jag kaller, "I call"; jag kallas, "I am called"; jag kallade, "I called"; jag kallades, "I was called." The West Germanic languages are English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, and Yiddish. They are spoken as a primary language by about 450 million people throughout the world. Among the dead West Germanic languages are Old Franconian, Old High German, and Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) from which Dutch, German, and English respectively developed.

29. Factors conditioning the formation of the national English language and its development into literary one. The formation of the national English language, or Standard English, is considered to date from the period between the 15th and 17th centuries. After that time the language continued to change, yet, henceforth one can speak of the evolution of Standard English instead of trading the similar or different trends in the history of its dialects. We must mention at least two of the external factors that led to this development: the unification of the country and the progress of culture. Other historical events, such as the increased foreign contacts, produced a more specific kind of influence on the language: they affected the word stock.The 15th and 16th centuries saw striking changes in the life of the country. Trade had extended beyond the local, boundaries and apart from farming and cattle-breeding an important wool trade and industry was carried on in the country-side. As the demand for wool and cloth rose, Britain began to export woolen cloth produced by the first big enterprises, the manufactures. The changes in the economic and social conditions were accompanied by the intermixture of people coming from different regions, the growth of towns with a mixed population, and the strengthening of social ties between the various regions. All these processes played an important role in the unification of the English language. Towards the end of the 16th century the period of feudal disunity in Britain came to an end, and Britain became a centralized state. In 1485 the strongest royal power under Henry VII was established. Henry VII was the founder of the Tudor dynasty and of a new kind of monarchy. The Tudors encouraged the development of trade inside and outside the country. The great geographical discoveries gave a new impetus to the progress of foreign trade. English traders set forth on daring journeys in search of gold and treasures. Sea pirates and slave-traders were patronised by Queen Elizabeth as readily as traders in wool, for they made large contributions to her treasury. Under the later Tudors England became one of the biggest trade and sea powers. In 1588 England defeated the Spanish fleet, the Invisible Armada, thus dealing a final blow to Spain, her main rival in overseas trade and in colonial expansion. In the late 16th century England founded its first colonies abroad. Thus the contacts of England with other nations although not necessarily friendly became closer, and new contacts were made in distant lands. These new ties could not but influence the development of the language. The rise of a new vigorous social class the bourgeoisie proved an enormous stimulus to the progress of learning, science, literature and art. Of all the outstanding achievements of this great age the invention of printing had the most immediate effect on the development of the language, its written form in particular. The written form of the English language became standardized earlier than its spoken form. The literary form of English Came into existence in the age of Chaucer, was fixed and spread with the introduction of printing and was further developed as the national (lie 16th and 17th centuries. The earliest date suggested as the time of the formation of the spoken standard is the end of the 17th century; the type of speech used in London and in the Universities was unanimously proclaimed the best type of English. The phoneticians and grammarians recommend it as a model of correct English. Naturally we possess no direct evidence of the existence of a spoken standard, since all the evidence comes from written sources. Valuable information is furnished by the language of private letters (compared to the language of professional writers), the speech of various characters in the Early New English drama, and also by some direct references of contemporary writers to different types of speech. 30. The influence of the Norman conquest on the development of the vocabulary. For centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and high-ranking nobles spoke one of the French langues d'ol, that we call Anglo-Norman, a variety of Old Norman used in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles during the Anglo-Norman period and originating from a northern langue d'ol dialect. Merchants and lower-ranked nobles were often bilingual in Anglo-Norman and English, whilst English continued to be the language of the common people. Since the French-speaking Normans were the ruling class, French was used for all state affairs and for most social and cultural matters; but the masses continued to speak English. Only towards the end of the fifteenth century did English become once more the language of the whole country. However, French words are found in every section of the vocabulary:

Law and governmental administration: judge, jury, justice, government, parliament, state Military affairs: conquer, sergeant, victory Religion: baptism, confess, divine, sermon Clothing: coat, dress, gown, robe Art: beauty image design Literature: chapter, poet, prose, rime Science: medicine, remedy, surgeon Even after the decline of Norman-French, standard French retained the status of a formal or prestige languageas with most of Europe during the periodand had a significant influence on the language, which is visible in Modern English. A tendency for French-derived words to have more formal connotations has continued to the present day. For example, most modern English speakers consider a "cordial reception" (from French) to be more formal than a "hearty welcome" (from Germanic). Another example is the rare construction of the words for animals being separate from the words for their meat, e.g., beef and pork (from the French buf and porc) being the products of "cows" and "pigs"animals with Germanic names.