Examples of strong verbs (British English)

· sing - sang - sung

· break - broke - broken

· run - ran - run

· hit - hit - hit

· bite - bit - bitten

· grow - grew - grown

· come - came - come

· write - wrote - written

· arise-arose-arisen

· beget-begot-begotten

· by sadhana.s 6th std

· sea international school

The verbal system in Old English (morphological classification) Ranez.Ru > Помощь в учебе абитуриентам и студентам > Студенту > Английский язык > История языка >
	The majority of OE verbs fell into two great divisions: the strong verbs and the weak verbs. Besides these two main groups there were a few verbs which could be put together as “minor” groups. The main difference between the strong and weak verbs lay in the means of forming the principal parts, or “stems” of the verb. The strong verbs formed their stems by means of ablaut and by adding certain suffixes; in some verbs ablaut was accompanied by consonant interchanges. The strong verbs had four stems, as they distinguished two stems in the Past Tense – one for the 1^st and 3^rd p. sg Ind. Mood, the other – for the other Past tense forms, Ind. and Subj. 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 -d- or -t-; normally they did not interchange their root vowel, but in some verbs suffixation was accompanied by a vowel interchange. Minor groups of verbs differed from the weak and strong verbs. Some of them combined certain features of the strong and weak verbs in a peculiar way (“preterite-present” verbs); others were suppletive or altogether anomalous. Strong Verbs The strong verbs in OE are usually divided into seven classes. Classes from 1 to 6 use vowel gradation which goes back to the IE ablaut-series modified in different phonetic conditions in accordance with PG and Early OE sound changes. Class 7 includes reduplicating verbs, which originally built their past forms by means of repeating the root-morpheme; this doubled root gave rise to a specific kind of root-vowel interchange. The principal forms of all the strong verbs have the same endings irrespective of class: -an for the Infinitive, no ending in the Past sg stem, -on in the form of Past pl, -en for Participle II. Weak Verbs The number of weak verbs in OE by far exceeded that of strong verbs. The verbs of Class I usually were i -stems, originally contained the element [-i/-j] between the root and the endings. The verbs of Class II were built with the help of the stem-suffix -ō, or - ōj and are known as ō -stems. Class III was made up of a few survivals of the PG third and fourth classes of weak verbs, mostly -ǽj -stems. Minor groups of Verbs The most important group of these verbs were the so-called “preterite-presents” or “past-present” verbs. Originally the Present tense forms of these verbs were Past tense forms. Later these forms acquired a present meaning but preserved many formal features of the Past tense. Most of these verbs had new Past Tense forms built with the help of the dental suffix. Some of them also acquired the forms of the verbals: Participles and Infinitives. In OE there were twelve preterite-present verbs. Six of them have survived in Mod E: OE ā з; cunnan; cann; dear(r), sculan, sceal; ma з an, mæ з; mōt (NE owe, ought; can; dare; shall; may; must). Most preterite-presents did not indicate actions, but expressed a kind of attitude to an action denoted by another verb, an Infinitive which followed the preterite-present. In other words they were used like modal verbs, and eventually developed into modern modal verbs.

Syntax. Word order. Questions. Prepositions and postpositions. Ranez.Ru > Помощь в учебе абитуриентам и студентам > Студенту > History of English - Old English >
	OE was largely a synthetic language; it possessed a system of grammatical forms, which could indicate the connection between words; consequently, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech - unless the texts were literal translations from Latin or poems with stereotyped constructions. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple; coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination; complicated syntactical constructions were rare. The syntactic structure of a language can be described at the level of the phrase and at the level of the sentence. In OE texts we find a variety of word phrases (also: word groups or patterns). The connection between the parts of the sentence was shown by the form of the words as they had formal markers for gender, case, number and person. The presence of formal markers made it possible to miss out some parts of the sentence which would be obligatory in an English sentence now. The formal subject was lacking in many impersonal sentences (though it was present in others). There was multiple negation within a single sentence or clause. The most common negative particle was "ne", which was placed before the verb; it was often accompanied by other negative words, mostly "naht" or "noht", these words reinforced the meaning of negation. Compound and complex sentences existed in the English language since the earliest times. Even in the oldest texts we find numerous instances of coordination and subordination and a large inventory of subordinate clauses, subject clauses, object clauses, attributive clauses adverbial clauses. Repetition of connectives at the head of each clause (correlation) was common in complex sentences. The Phrase. Noun, Adjective and Verb Patterns. A noun pattern consisted of a noun as the head word and pronouns, adjectives, numerals and other nouns as determiners and attributes. Most noun modifiers agreed with the noun in gender, number and case. on ðǽm ōðrum ðrīm daзum ‘in those other three days’ – Dat. pl Masc. An adjective pattern could include adverbs, nouns or pronouns in one of the oblique cases with or without prepositions, and infinitives. him wæs manna ðearf ‘he was in need of man’. Verb patterns included a great variety of dependant components: nouns and pronouns in oblique cases with or without prepositions, adverbs, infinitives and participles brinз ðā ðīnз ‘bring those things’. Word order. The word order of Old English was not important because of the aforementioned morphology of the language. As long as declension was correct, it did not matter whether you said, "My name is..." as "Mīn nama is..." or "Nama mīn is..." Questions. Because of its similarity with Old Norse, it is believed that the word order of Old English changed when asking a question, from subject-verb-object to verb-subject-object. I am... becomes Am I...? Ic eom... becomes Eom ic...? Prepositions and postpositions. Old English prepositions often come after their object; that is, an Old English prepositional phrase can consist of a noun or noun phrase followed by a preposition. E.g: God cwæð him ðus to(God said thus to him). In the example the object of the preposition is a personal pronoun. Prepositions usually precede their objects when the object is a noun, but they often follow the object if the object is a pronoun.

SEMINAR 5

Linguistic situation of the Middle English period
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