Perfect and progressive forms

The perfect of the verbs had not yet been standardised to use uniformly the auxiliary verb "to have". Some took as their auxiliary verb "to be", as in this example from the King James Bible, "But which of you ... will say unto him ... when he is come from the field, Go and sit down..." [Luke XVII:7]. The rules that determined which verbs took which auxiliaries were similar to those still observed in German and French.

The modern syntax used for the progressive aspect ("I am walking") became dominant by the end of the Early Modern period, but other forms were also common. These included the prefix a- ("I am a-walking") and the infinitive paired with "do" ("I do walk"). Moreover, the to be + -ing verb form could be used to express a passive meaning without any additional markers: "The house is building" could mean "The house is being built."

Verbal Grammatical Categories in OE

In OE there were two non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the Participle. The verbal nature of the Infinitive and the Participle was revealed in some of their functions and in their syntactic "combinability": they could take direct objects and be modified by adverbs.

The Infinitive had no verbal grammatical categories.

It had a reduced case-system: two forms which corresponded to the Nom. and the Dat. cases of nouns —

beran — uninfected Infinitive ("Nom." case)

to berenne or to beranne — inflected Infinitive ("Dat." case)

The uninflected Infinitive was used in verb phrases with modal verbs or other verbs of incomplete predication.

The Participle was verbal adjective which was characterised 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.

The forms of the two participles were strictly differentiated. Participle I was formed from the Present tense stem (the Infinitive without the endings -an, -ian) with the help of the suffix -ende. Participle II had a stem of its own — in strong verbs it was marked by a certain grade of the root-vowel interchange and by the suffix -en; with weak verbs it ended in -dl-t. Participle II was commonly marked by the prefix 5e-, though it could also occur without it, especially if the verb had other word-building prefixes, e. g.

Infinitive Participle I Participle II

bindan bindende зe-bunden (NE bind)

a-drencan a-drencende ɛɛd-drenced ('drown')

In MEthe grammatical categories of the finite form of the verbs are: person, number, tense, mood, voice and aspect. The ME non-finite forms of the verb were characterized by relative tense and voice distinctions.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1324