ME verb system Its changes and development

Finite forms. Number, Person, Mood and Tense  Number  in the 13-14th c. the ending –en - the main marker of the plural forms of the verb (past tense),  strong verbs in the Past had also root vowel interchange to distinguish between Sg. and Pl. But both these markers became unstable in the late 14th c.: But both these markers became unstable in the late 14th c.:  the ending –en was often missed out in the 14th c. and was dropped completely in the 15th c  Pl. and Sg. Past forms merged into one

Person  For the 3rd Pr. Sg. different OE endings (- þ, -eþ, -iaþ ) merged into a single ending – (e)th.  Then the ending -(e)s becomes a new marker which came from the North (more widely used in the NE period).  The distinction of the 2nd person Sg. existed as long as the pronoun thou (OE þū ) was used

 Beginning with the 15th c. the plural forms of the 2nd person – ye/you, your – were applied more and more often to individuals.  In Shakespeare’s time the plural forms of the 2nd person were widely used as equivalents of thou, thee, thine. Later thou became obsolete in Standard English.

Mood  Synthetic forms are still used for the Subjunctive Mood (although there was a growth of homonymy between the Subjunctive and the Indicative forms)  There appear new, analytical forms consisting of: the modal verbs ‘should’ and ‘might’, which lost their lexical meaning, and the infinitive

Tense  As before there were two means of building Past forms:  1) root vowel interchange for strong verbs.  2) dental suffix –ed, which was used by weak verbs

Tense  The only exception was a small group of verbs (weak verbs cl.1)  The dental suffix fused with the last consonant of the root /t/, and after the loss of endings, three principal forms coincided: OE settan – sette – geset(ed), ME seten –sette – set, NE set – set – set

Tense  A new grammatical tense appears in ME  It is caused by the development of analytical forms of the verb.  The Future: a) “shall”+ Infinitive, b) “willen” + Infinitive.

 a) was a principal means of indicating future action in any context, but at the same time “shall” remained a modal verb with the meaning of necessity. Sometimes its meaning was weakened. In Late ME “shall” was used both as a modal verb and as a Future auxiliary.  In b) the modal meaning of volition in “willen” was more obvious than the modal meaning of “shall”.

Voice  In the OE period the finite verb had no category of Voice.  It appeared in ME and developed from OE verb phrase consisting of OE “beon” and “weordan” + Participle II of transitive verbs. It expressed not only states, but also actions.

Aspect  Perfect Forms  The main source of these forms was the OE “possessive” construction (have something done) with the verb “habban” + a direct object + Participle II of a transitive verb.

Aspect  Gradually the verb “habban” started to be used with other verbs (intransitive), which shows that it was developing into an auxiliary.

Aspect  The other source of the Perfect forms  the OE phrase: link verb “beon” + Participle II of an intransitive verb.  In ME the two verb phrases turned into analytical forms of “perfect”, where Participle II did not agree with the subject.

Aspect  The phrase like “have something done” changed into “have done something” with the object following Participle II

Aspect  The verb phrase “beon + Participle I” was used in OE prose to denote a quality, or a lasting state characterizing the subject.  In early ME this phrase stopped to be used with the exception of some dialects in Kent and in the North.  In Late ME it extended to other dialects and its frequency grew again.

Changes in the morphological classes of verbs Rearrangement of classes  the OE endings were all reduced to ME –en  the root-vowel interchange became less consistent

 The most important change in the strong verb system - the reduction of stems from 4 to 3  Another important event of that period was the transition of some strong verbs into weak ones

 Out of 195 OE strong verbs preserved in the language, only 67 remained strong. 128 strong verbs acquired weak forms. (e.g.: grip – from class 1; lock - from class 2; climb, help – from class 3).  The number of new verbs which joined the strong verbs was very small: a) several former weak verbs (wear, dig, stick); b) three borrowings (take, thrive – Scandinavian; strive – O.Fr.)

The development of WEAK VERBS  In ME there were 2 classes of weak verbs (from OE three classes):  Class 1 used -de for the Past and –ed for Participle II

 Class 2: -ede for the Past and –ed for Participle II –ed for Participle II (which are the weakened forms for –ode,-od in OE).  In Late ME the final / ǝ / in –(e)de became unstable and gradually was lost, which made the forms of Past and Participle II homonymous.

Changes in non-finite forms of the verb  The main trend - gradual loss of most nominal features and growth of verbal features.

Participle I  The form of Participle I in Early ME 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 became the dominant form in the literary language.

Participle I  Participle I coincided with the verbal noun, which was formed in OE with the help of the suffixes –ung and –ing, but preserved only one suffix, -ing, in ME.  The fusion of Participle I with the verbal noun was an important factor of the growth of a new verbid, the Gerund.

Gerund  The Late ME 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.

Gerund  In OE the syntactic functions of the verbal noun, the infinitive and the participle partly overlapped.  In ME 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 the direct objects, like participles 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.

Questions on ME grammar (noun, adjective, pronoun) Variant 1 1. Which grammatical categories did the ME adjective lose, which did it preserve? Variant 2 1. How did the case system of the OE noun change in ME? Variant 3 1. Which nouns preserved the means of building their plural form according to the OE declension types?

Variant 1 2. Which forms of personal pronouns were borrowed from Scandinavian during ME? Variant 2 2. What was the new means of forming the degrees of comparison of adjectives? Variant 3 2. From which parts of speech did the articles derive?