Oe vowel system

MONOPHTHONGS	DIPHTHONGS
short a æ e i o u y long a: æ: e: i: o: u: y:	ea eo io ie ea: eo: io: ie:

ЛЕКЦИИ 4 – 5

MORPHOLOGY

The parts of speech in Proto-Germanic are traditionally divided into Substantives and Verbs. In OE Substantives had already differentiated into distinct parts of speech, such as Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, and Numeral, but they differed from what they are like now. There were other parts of speech – Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction, and Interjection; there were also participles and infinitives. But the OE language lacked some parts of speech. There were no articles, no gerunds; besides some classes of pronouns were missing.

In ME a new part of speech appeared - an article which developed from the pronouns. Besides new classes of pronouns and a new group of adjectives developed.

In the ME period the English language began to turn into an analytical type of. Many grammatical forms in ME were formed in analytical way with the help of auxiliary verbs. If to speak about means of word-building we should mention that suppletive form-building and sound interchanges were not productive. Inflections were still used but they were less varied. This gave reason to H. Sweet to call this period “a period of leveled endings”. The most important way of form-building was now the analytical way. Free word phrases became analytical grammatical forms. But this way affected the verbs.

Concerning nominal parts it should be mentioned that the main direction of their development was morphological simplification.

These changes of morphology influenced the English syntax: new patterns of the word phrase and the sentence appeared.

Form-building

The peculiar morphological feature of the parts of speech in OE was that they had a system of synthetic forms. Due to phonetic developments (changes of unstressed vowels) many of them were homonymous. There was still another factor that influenced the development of morphological forms – Scandinavian influence which became obvious in the ME period. The languages were close and very often the words differed only in grammatical endings. As a result they were further neutralized and this process began in the North where the Scandinavian influence was stronger and gradually spread to the south and south-west.

Many grammatical forms in ME were formed in analytical way with the help of auxiliary verbs. If to speak about means of word-building we should mention that suppletive form-building and sound interchanges were not productive. Inflections were still used but they were less varied. This gave reason to H. Sweet to call this period “a period of leveled endings”. The analytical way of form-building was becoming more important. Free word phrases became analytical grammatical forms. This development influenced the verb. The verb paradigm became more complicated while the nominal parts of speech underwent morphological simplification.

These changes of morphology influenced the English syntax: new patterns of the word phrase and the sentence appeared.

The tendencies of the ME continued in NE. The border between ME and NE is very obscure as they are two stages of the same process. With the introduction of printing and the appearance of grammar books the changes which had been spontaneous to some extent and allowed the use of parallel forms, became fixed and predetermined.