Nominal parts of speech in the Old English (the noun, the pronoun, the adjective).

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1518.

History of the English language

OE was synthetic language – different inflections were used as the principle way of connecting words into a sentence. A separate word could take different formal elements to express certain relationships between words. In building grammatical forms OE implied grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root grammatical prefixes and suppletive forms. The Noun. OE nouns have the following grammatical categories: 1) Gender; 2) Number; 3) Case. Gender in OE was lexico-grammatical. Each noun with all its grammatical forms belonged to some gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). In other IE languages OE nouns belonged to this or that gender without any consideration of sex. In some cases the gender is determined by the lexical meaning of the word. e.g.: mann, faeder, cynin3 – m; modor, cwen – f. Very often the gender in OE is logical, not determined by sex of an object or lexical meaning. e.g.: stan, mona – m; sunne – f; wif, cild – n; wifmann – m. On the whole the gender of all OE nouns was inconsistent and formal. Number. OE nouns as in other IE languages have 2 numbers – sing. and pl. There are the same way of forming pl. as in ME and NE: 1) Inflections. e.g.: OE bridd (s) – briddas (pl); modor – modru; nama – naman. 2) Umlaut (palatal mutation). e.g.: OE toth – teth. 3) Zero inflection. e.g.: OE ban – ban. The degree of importance and the frequency of usage in OE are different. 3) Case. The case system of OE nouns is simplier than that of Latin. In OE there were only 4 cases of nouns: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative. Nominative case can be defined as the case of an agent. This case can indicate the subject or the predicate. e.g.: He waes swithe spedi3 man. Genitive case of nouns and pronouns serving as attributes to other nouns. Dative case is the chief case used with prepositions. It denotes the object to which the action is directed. It is used with nouns in the function of indirect object. e.g.: on mor3ene (in the morgen). Accusative indicates relationship to a verb and expresses the object which itself is touched by the action. Nouns have the function of the direct object. Types of declension of OE nouns. OE nouns have a 2-part structure: the root + inflection. The stem-building suffixes didn't survived – they disappeared altogether, some merged with the stem or the inflection and gave a new inflection. The stem-building suffix can be found in OE nouns only in some oblique cases. e.g.: Nom s. stan – pl. stanas. Depending on the former stem-building suffixes there was the division of nouns in OE according to their stems. Nouns compiling different stem-groups are declined differently as they belong to different types of declension. OE nouns are divided: 1) Strong declension. (Nouns with the stem in a vowel: a, o, i, u). 2) Weak declension. (Nouns with the stem in: n). 3) Consonantal declension. (Nouns with the stem in the consonant: r, s). 4) Root declension. (Nouns with the root stem which change their root vowel). Strong declension is also called a vowel declension, because here belong nouns the stem of which ends in one of 4 vowels. The group of vowels in ‘a' includes the nouns of m. and n. genders. To the o-stem group belong only f. nouns, ending in ‘u' or a consonant. To the group of nouns with i-stem belong nouns of all 3 genders. This declension embraces also some names of tribes and people which is used only in pl. To the group of nouns in ‘u' belong nouns of m. and f. genders. Weak declension includes nouns of all 3 genders. Consonantal declension: r-declension includes nouns denoting family relationships; s-declension includes nouns with s-stem which in all Germanic languages except Gth. changed into r-stem. (Rhotacism). Only few nouns of n. gender remained in that group in OE. S-stem transformed into r-stem. This could be seen in the Nom. Pl. e.g.: cild – cildru. Root declension includes nouns which have never had the stem suffix. These words are also very old by origin and they belong to m. and f. genders. In all OG languages including OE adjectives have the following features: 1) Agreement with the noun they belong to. 2) Declension in 2 forms. 3) Change in degrees of comparison. In OE adjectives have 5-case system; category of number; gender; definiteness/indefiniteness; degrees of comparison. The adjective which is used attributively agrees with the number in gender, number and case. That is why the endings of OE adjectives have the meanings of gender, number, case, and definitness/indefinitness of a noun the adjective belongs to. OE adjectives like nouns have strong and weak declension but these declensions in OE adjectives are different than that of nouns. With nouns the strong and weak declensions serve to group them into semantic classes with adjectives this division serves to express definiteness or indefiniteness. Strong declension. The adjectives are used with such nouns which denote an object in the general sense. The strong declension of adjectives differs from that of nouns in coinciding of some case forms of adjectives with the forms of pronouns. Weak declension. The adjectives are used with such nouns which are taken in the specific sense – the meaning of definiteness. The weak declension of adjective does not differ from that of nouns except in Gen. pl. of all the genders which often take the ending ‘-ra'. Degrees of comparison. Like adjectives in other languages, most OE adjectives distinguished between three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative and superlative. The regular means used to form the comparative and the superlative from the positive were the suffixes: ‘-ra' and ‘-esr/ost'. Sometimes suffixation was accompanies by an interchange of the root vowel. The mutation of the root vowel was caused by i-umlaut in Early OE. At that stage the suffixes were either ‘-ira/ist' or ‘-ora/ost'. In the forms with ‘i' the root vowel was fronted or made narrower, later ‘i' was lost or weakened to ‘e' – but the mutated root vowel survived as an additional formal marker of the comparative and superlative degrees. Some adjectives had parallel sets of forms: with and without a vowel interchange. The peculiarities of the system of OE pronouns: 1) Absence of the group of possessive pronouns. Gen. case of personal pronouns was used instead. 2) There is a group of demonstrative pronouns which in the course of time have weakened their lexical meaning in the function of the definite article. 3) Some groups of pronouns preserve the instrumental case. Personal pronouns have 3 persons, 2-3 numbers and 3 genders only in the 3^rd person singular. Pronouns of the 1^st and 2^nd number are the most archaic. They have no real declension as their forms originated from different roots. They have the form of the dual number which indicates 2 persons or things. Demonstrative pronouns have grammatical categories of number, gender and case. There are 2 groups in OE: 1) The prototype of the NE ‘that': se (m), seo (f), thaet (n). they are pronouns the demonstrative meaning of which has been weakened and they have started to be used in the function of the definite article in the course of time. 2) The prototype of the NE ‘this': thes (m), theos (f), this (n). This group fully preserves its demonstrative meaning. Demonstrative pronouns are declined like adjectives according to a 5-case system: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental. The meaning of these pronouns is often weakened so that it approaches the state of an article. The traditional view is that the definite article appears in OE while the indefinite article in ME.