- •1. The comparative-historical method in linguistics.
- •3. Semantic change and analogy in historical linguistics.
- •4. Indo-European family of the languages.
- •5. Ancient Germanic tribes and their classification. The Great Migration of Germanic tribes.
- •6. Linguistic characteristics of Germanic languages
- •7. Grimm’s law. Verner’s law. Vowel changes.
- •8. Germanic alphabet. The earliest writings. Grammatical peculiarities of Germanic languages.
- •9. Chronological division of the history of English.
- •10. Pre-Germanic Britain. The Roman conquest.
- •11. The Anglo-Saxon invasion. Old English kingdoms and dialects.
- •12. Old English word stress. Old English phonetics.
- •13. Old English grammar. Nomina.
- •The Noun Grammatical categories. The use of cases
- •The Pronoun
- •Personal pronouns
- •Demonstrative pronouns
- •Other classes of pronouns
- •The Adjective
- •14. Old English grammar. Verb.
- •Strong Verbs
- •Weak Verbs
- •Minor groups of Verbs
- •15 The Scandinavian invasion. Its influence on English.
- •16 The Norman conquest. Its influence on English.
- •17 Struggle between English and French. Middle English dialects.Hyperlink "http://www.Ranez.Ru/article/id/684/" The London dialect
- •18 Me Word Stress. Vowels in Middle English
- •19. Middle English consonants. Middle English syntax.
- •20. Middle English grammar
- •21. The development of Middle English noun and adjective.
- •22. The development of Middle English verb.
- •23????????????????
- •24. The system of Middle English spelling.
- •25. Spread of the London dialect in the 15th century. Formation of the literary language.
- •26. The Great Vowel Shift.
- •27. Sound changes in early modern English.
- •28. The expansion of English.
- •29. The characteristic features and historical reasons of the American vowels. The American dialects.
- •30. Modern Germanic languages.
13. Old English grammar. Nomina.
The grammar of Old English is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more inflected. As an old Germanic language, the morphological system of Old English is similar to that of the hypothetical Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including characteristically Germanic constructions such as the umlaut.
Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners were fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), two grammatical numbers (singular and plural) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). First- and second-person personal pronouns also had dual forms for referring to groups of two people, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. The instrumental case was somewhat rare and occurred only in the masculine and neuter singular; it could typically be replaced by the dative.
The Noun Grammatical categories. The use of cases
The OE noun had two grammatical categories: number and case. Also, nouns distinguished three genders, but gender was not a grammatical category; it was merely a classifying feature accounting for the division of nouns into morphological classes. The category of number consisted of two members: singular and plural. The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative.
The Nom. can be defined as the case of the active agent, for it was the case of the subject mainly used with verbs denoting activity; the Nom. could also indicate the subject characterized by a certain quality or state; could serve as a predicative and as the case of address.
The Gen. case was primarily the case of nouns and pronouns serving as attributes to other nouns. The meanings of the Gen. case were very complex and can only be grouped under the headings “Subjective” and “Objective” Gen. Subjective Gen. is associated with the possessive meaning and the meaning of origin. Objective Gen. is associated with what is termed “partitive meaning” as in sum hund scipa ‘a hundred of ships’.
Dat. was the chief case used with prepositions, e.g. on morзenne ‘in the morning’
The Acc. case was the form that indicated a relationship to a verb. Being the direct object it denoted the recipient of an action, the result of the action and other meanings.
The Pronoun
OE pronouns fell under the same main classes as modern pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. As for the other groups – relative, possessive and reflexive – they were as yet not fully developed and were not always distinctly separated from the four main classes.
Personal pronouns
In OE, while nouns consistently distinguished between four cases, personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions: the forms of the Dat. case of the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p. were frequently used instead of the Acc. It is important to note that the Gen. case of personal pronouns had two main applications: like other oblique cases of noun-pronouns it could be an object, but far more frequently it was used as an attribute or a noun determiner, like a possessive pronoun, e.g.sunu mīn.