14.Degrees of comparison in oe. & their futher development.

Most adj. distinguished between 3 degrees of comparison: positive,comparative,superlative.The regular means to form the comparative & the superlative from the positive were the suffixes –ra & -est/ost. Sometimes suffixation was accompanied by an interchange of the root-vowel. Eald-ieldra-ieldest(old), lon3-len3ra-len3est(long). The mutation of the root-vowel was caused by i-umlaut in Early OE. At that stage the suffixes were either –ira, -ist or –ora, -ost. In the forms with –i the root-vowel was fronted & made narrower, later –i was lost & weakened to –e. In ME the degrees of comparison could be built in the same way as in OE, only suffixes had been weakened to-er, -est & the interchange of the root-vowelwas less common than before. Since most adj. with the sound alternation had parallel forms without it, the forms with the interchange soon fell into disuse.(Long, lenger, lengest & long, longer, longest.) The alternation of root-vowel in Early NE survived in the adj. old, elder, eldest, where the difference in meaning from older, oldest, made the formal distinction essential.Also alternation are found in the pairs farther & further. The most important innovation in the adj. system in the ME period was the growth of analytical forms of the degrees of comparison. The new system of comparisons emerged in ME , but the ground from the OE adverbs with adj. & participles. In ME, when the phrases with ME more, most became more & more common, they were used with all kinds of adj., regardless of the number of syllables & were even preferred with mono- & disyllabic words. The 2 sets of forms, synthetic & analytical, were used in free variation until the 17^th & 18^th , when the modern standart usage was established. It appears that in the course of history the adj. has lost all the dependent grammatical categories but has preserved the only specifically adjectival category-the comparison. The adj. is the only nominal part of speech which makes use of the new, analytical, way of form-building.

15. The OE personal pronouns.Eng.pron.fell under the same classes like E.Mod.Pr:Personal,Demonstr.,Poses.,Relative

OE personal pronouns had 3 persons, 3 numbers in the 1^st & 2^nd peron(2 numbers-in the 3^rd ) & three genders in the 3^rd p.The pronouns of the 3rdp., having originated from demonstrative pronouns, had many affinities with the later. In OE, while nouns consistently distinguished between 4 cases, personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions: the forms of the Dat case of the pronouns of the 1^st & 2^nd p. were frequently used instead of the Acc; in fact the fusion of these 2 cases in the pl. was completed in the WS dialect already in Early OE , in the sg. usage was variable, but variant forms revealed the same tendency to generalize the form of the Dat for both cases. The Gen. case of personal pronouns had 2 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. Though forms of the Gen case were employed as possessive pronouns, they cannot be regarded as possessive pronouns proper (that is, as separate class of pronouns). The grammatical characteristic of these forms were not homogeneous. The forms of the 1^st & 2^nd p. were declined like adj. to show agreement with the nouns they modified, while the forms of the 3^rd p. behaved like nouns: they remained uninflected & did not agree with the nouns they modified. The oblique cases of personal pronouns in combination with the adj. self could also serve as reflexive pronouns.