OE Grammar (General Survey).

Modern Germanic Languages.

According to genealogical/historical classification of languages English belongs to the Germanic group of languages of the Indo-European family of languages.

Germanic group today includes the following modern languages:

1. English

2. Danish

3. German

4. Icelandic

5. Netherlandish /Dutch

6. Norwegian

7. Swedish

8. Faroese

9. Frisian

10. Afrikaans

11. Yiddish.

Chronological Divisions in the History of English.

Short Survey of the Periods.

In all language histories divisions into periods and cross-sections of a certain length, are used for teaching and research purposes though in fact the historical development of a language is a continuous uninterrupted process without sudden breaks or rapid transformations. Therefore any periodisation imposed on language history by linguists, with precise dates, is artificial. The commonly accepted, traditional periodisation divides English history into three periods: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) and New English (NE), each of the periods has a few sub-periods.

Old English period:

Early OE (pre-written period) – V-VII c (from the settlement of Germanic tribes on the isles till the first written records found).

Late OE (Anglo-Saxon) – VIII c – 1066 (from the first written records till the Norman conquest of Britain).

Middle English Period

Early ME (French/Anglo-Norman language as official) – 1066-1350.

Late ME (the English of Chaucer) – 1350-1475 (restoration of English to the position of a state language).

Transition ME (Classical ME, The English of Caxton) – 1475-1500.

New English period

Early NE (the age of Shakespeare and formation of the national English Language) – 1500-1660.

Late NE (Neo-Classical period, the period of normalisation of English) – 1660-1800.

Modern English

Early Mod E (establishing of English standard national language and spreading of English all over the world) – XIX c-1945.

Present-day English (becomes gradually an international language) – since 1945 till present time.

OE Grammar (General Survey).

OE was a synthetic or inflected type of the language: it showed the relations between words and expressed other grammatical meanings mainly with the help of simple (synthetic) grammatical forms. In building grammatical forms OE employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root, grammatical prefixes, and suppletive formation.

Grammatical endings (or inflections) were the principal form-building means used: they were found in all the parts of speech that could change their form. They were usually used alone but could also occur in combination with other means.

Sound interchanges were employed on a more limited scale and were often combined with other form-building means; especially endings. Vowel interchanges were more common than interchanges of consonants.

The use of prefixes in grammatical forms was rare and was confined to verbs. Suppletive forms were restricted to several pronouns, a few adjectives and a couple of verbs.

OE had a rather developed system of parts of speech. Inflected parts of speech (the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral, the verb) possessed certain grammatical categories displayed in formal and semantic correlations and oppositions of grammatical forms. Grammatical categories are usually subdivided into nominal categories, found in nominal parts of speech and verbal categories found chiefly in the finite verb.

There were five nominal grammatical categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison, and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness. Each part of speech had its own peculiarities in the inventory of categories and the number of members within the category (categorial forms). The noun had only two grammatical categories proper: number and case. The adjective had the maximum number of categories - five. The number of members in the same grammatical categories in different parts of speech did not necessarily coincide: thus the noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative, whereas the adjective had five (the same four cases plus the Instrumental case). Perhaps in the pre-written period the noun had five cases, since cases of adjectives depend on the cases of nouns. This supposition is confirmed by several instances of specific Instrumental noun-endings in the earliest texts. The personal pronouns of the 1^st and 2^nd p., unlike other parts of speech, distinguished three numbers –– Singular, Plural and Dual. Verbal grammatical categories were not numerous: tense and mood-verbal categories proper and number and person, showing agreement between the verb-predicate and the subject of the sentence. The distinction of categorial forms by the noun and the verb was to a large extent determined by their division into morphological classes: declensions and conjugations.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1461