Development of the System of Verbids and Their Grammatical Categories

In Old English the system of verbids consisted of the infinitive and two participles. Their nominal features were more pronounced than their verbal features, i. e. in many respects they were closer to the nouns and adjectives than to the finite verb. Their verbal nature 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 Nominative and the Dative cases of nouns:

beran– uninflected inf. (Nom. case),

tō berenne (beranne) – inflected inf. (Dat. case).

E. g. Manige cōmon tō bycgenne Þā Þing. – Many (people) came to buy those things.

Like the Dative case of nouns the inflected infinitive with the preposition tō could be used to indicate the direction or purpose of an action.

OE 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.

Participle I was formed from the present tense stem with the help of the suffix – ende: berende (bearing), farende (going), helpende (helping), lufiende (loving), timbrende (building), etc.

Participle II of strong verbs was marked by a certain grade of the root-vowel interchange and by the suffix – en:

Participle II of weak verbs ended in –d/-t:

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. Sometimes, however, they remained uninflected.

The main trends of their evolution in Middle English and Modern English can be defined as gradual loss of most nominal features (except syntactical functions) and growth of verbal features: the case distinctions in the infinitive and the forms of agreement in the participles have been lost.

The preposition tō, which was placed in Old English before the inflected infinitive to show direction or purpose, lost its prepositional force and changed into a formal sign of the infinitive.

The distinctions between the two participles were preserved in Middle English and Modern English. Participle I had an active meaning. Participle II had an active or passive meaning depending on the transitivity of the verb.

The form of Participle I in Early Middle English is of special interest, as it displayed considerable dialectal differences: the Southern and Midland forms were derived from the present tense stem with the help of – ing(e), while other dialects had forms in –inde, -ende, and –ande. The first of these variants [-ing(e)] became the dominant form in the literary language. Participle I coincided with the verbal noun, which was formed in Old English with the help of the suffixes –ung and –ing, but preserved only one suffix, - ing, in Middle English.

The fusion of Participle I with the verbal noun was an important factor of the growth of a new verbid, the Gerund.

The Late Middle English period witnessed the growth of the gerund. The gerund can be traced to three sources: (1) the OE verbal noun in –ung and –ing, (2) the Present Participle and (3) the Infinitive.

In Old English the syntactic functions of the verbal noun, the infinitive and the participle partly overlapped. In Middle English the Present Participle and the verbal noun became identical: they both ended in –ing. This led to the confusion of some of their features: verbal nouns began to take direct objects, like participle and infinitives. This verbal feature - a direct object – as well as the frequent absence of article before the –ing-form functioning as a noun – transformed the verbal noun into a gerund in the modern understanding of the term. The disappearance of the inflected infinitive contributed to the change, as some of its functions were taken over by the gerund (Rastorguyeva 1983).

Unit 27

Date: 2014-12-22; view: 1629