The evolution of strong and weak verbs. Change in the grammatical categories of the English verb.

All the forms of the OE verb were synthetic, the analytical forms were only beginning to appear. There were the finite forms of the verb and the non-finite forms of the verb, or verbals (Infinitive, Participle). In the most general of terms, the verbal system as a whole was greatly simplified in comparison with the I-E system.

Morphological classification of verbs.

OE inherited a verbal system from Germanic that was frequently characterized by vowel alternations within the root, known as Ablaut. The alternations themselves were not greatly changed from Germanic to OE.

The verbs of OE are divided into strong verbs and weak ones. These groups further divided into different classes of conjugation.

Strong verbs.

The total number of ‘strong’ verbs was only slightly higher than 300. They were native words descending from PG and many of them were very frequent in the language. The strong verbs differed from the weak ones primarily in the shape of the preterit: they were characterized by ablaut in the middle of the word.

Strong verbs are traditionally subdivided into six classes, depending on the sequences of root vowels that appear in the different tenses. Some authors include a seventh class, which consists of reduplicating verbs. The strong verbs have four principal forms: Infinitive, Past tense singular, Past tense plural, Past Participle.

Weak verbs

The ‘weak’ verbs constitute the vast majority of the verbs. Unlike the strong verbs they had stable root vowels and tended to add a dental ending (-d- or –t-), sometimes consisting of an extra syllable. The OE weak verbs are relatively younger than the strong verbs. They reflect a later stage in the development of Germanic languages. They were an open class in OE, as new verbs that entered the language generally formed their forms on analogy with the weak verbs. The strong verbs were ‘root-stem’ verbs, i.e. they did not have any stem-forming suffix following the root, but they added their grammatical endings to the root directly. The weak verbs, however, had a stem-forming suffix that followed the root and preceded the grammatical ending. In accordance with the character of the stem-suffix the weak verbs are subdivided into three classes.

Irregular verbs

Most verbs in OE were regular – in their conjugation they followed one of the patterns typical of this or that class of strong or weak verbs. However, there were also a few irregular verbs, conjugated in some specific way.

Irregular weak verbs

The sign of irregularity of the weak verbs in OE was vowel interchange, a feature not typical of this group of verbs.

The majority of the weak verbs belonging to the 1^st and 2^nd classes were regular, but there were also some irregular verbs: tellan –talde – tald (to tell), sellan –salde – sald (to sell).

The weak verbs of the 3^rd class are considered to be irregular, because the class consists of only three verbs, following their own individual patterns of form-building.

Irregular strong verbs

There was a group of strong verbs which in the pre-written period lost some of their forms and preserved the others, changing their lexical and grammatical meaning. These verbs are called preterite-present. Originally the Present tense forms of these verbs were Past forms. Later these forms acquired a present meaning but preserved many formal features of the Past tense. The new past tense forms of these verbs in OE are built with the help of dental suffixation, like weak verbs. The majority of preterite-present verbs are defective – they do not have all the forms of regular verbs, which lost their connection with the other forms and were dropped.

Preterite-present verbs were further to develop in a number of different ways.

E.g. different forms of one verb ā an developed into 3 words of NE: owe, own, ought.

The other irregular strong verbs developed into modern modal and auxiliary verbs can-could, dare, shall-should, may-might, must.

Suppletive verbs

Suppletion, as we know, is one of the oldest means of form-building. All Indo-European languages, and English among them, have suppletive verbs – those building different forms from different roots. Each of them is a class in itself. Among such verbs we may mention the following: bēon – wesan (be); ān – eode (go), don – dyde (do). The first verb of each of the pairs above is the root for the Present tense, the second – for the past.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 2129