- •1. The Old Germanic language, their classification and principle features.
- •2. The origin of the English language.
- •3. The chronological division of the history of English.
- •5. The position of English and its role in the world.
- •6. The oe vowel system. Major changes during the period.
- •7. Word order
- •8. The Great Vowel Shift.(gvs)
- •9. Major consonant changes in the history of English.
- •10. I-mutation and its traces in modern English
- •11. Changes in the vocabulary system in me
- •12. The oe noun system and its further changes
- •13,14 The oe adjective and its further development in me. Degrees of comparison.
- •15. The oe personal pronouns
- •16. Changes in the vocabulary system in ne period
- •17. The oe verb, its grammatical & morphological categories
- •18. Strong V. In oe & their further development
- •19. Weak V. In oe & their further development
- •20. Preterite-present V. In oe & their further development
- •21. The rise of the perfect forms
- •22. The rise of the passive forms
- •23. The oe vocabulary & its etymological characteristics
- •24. Main types of word-formation in oe
- •25. French loans.
- •26. Scandinavian loans.
- •27. Latin loans.
- •28. Main peculiarities of oe poetry.
- •29. Grimm’s Law.
- •30. Verner’s law.
- •32. Chaucer and his “Canterbury Tales”
- •33. The rise of articles
- •35 The root-stem declension in oe
- •36.The rise of do-forms
- •37. The rise of the future forms.
- •38. Gram. Agreement and government.
- •39. The non-finite forms of the verb in oe and their further development.
- •40. Forms of negotiation in oe.
15. The oe personal pronouns
OE pronouns fell under the same main classes as modern pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. The grammatical categories of the pronouns were either similar to those of nouns or corresponded to those of adjectives. Some features of pronouns were peculiar to them alone.
OE personal pronouns had 3 persons, 3 numbers in the 1st and 2nd p. (2 numbers – in the 3rd ) and 3 genders in the 3rd person. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons had suppletive forms like their parallels in other Indo-European lang.
In OE personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions: the forms of the Dat. Case of the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons were frequently used instead of the Acc.
The Gen.case of personal pronouns had 2 main applications: like other oblique (косвенный) 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 (his fæder). The forms of the 2nd and 1st were declined like adjectives to show agreement with the nouns they modified, while the forms of the 3d person behaved like nouns: they remained uninflected and did not agree with the nouns they modified.
The oblique cases of personal pronouns in combination with the adjective self could also serve as reflexive pronouns.
16. Changes in the vocabulary system in ne period
The growth of the English vocabulary from internal sources can be observed in all periods of history. As before, word formation fell into 2 types:
1)Word derivation (suffixation (native suffixes:-er-writer, -ness, -don, -ship, -hood, -man (eg: woman), -ish-feverish, -y-hairy, risky, -less, -ful: borrowed suffixes: (entered the English language with the two biggest waves of loan-words (-able), were used to form different parts of speech: nouns, adjectives and verbs: -ess (governess), -ty, -age, -ry, -ment, -able/-ible, -al, -ic…), prefixation (native prefixes: out, under, over; borrowed prefixes: re, de, dis, en/in, dis, un, im, non, extra, semi, co, anti, pre…), sound interchanges ( has grown due to the weakening and loss of many suffixes and grammatical endings- song - sing), word stress (in many derived words it served as an additional distinctive feature together with other world-building means (relax - relaxation)): conversion was a new method of word derivation which arose in Late ME and grew into a most productive, specifically English way of creating new words. Conversation is effected through a change in the meaning, the grammatical paradigm and the syntactic use of the word in the sentence. The word is transformed into another part of speech with an identical initial form (house (noun) – house (verb)).
2) Word composition. Compound words of the ME and Early NE periods were formed after the word-building patterns inherited from OE: two noun-stems (workshop, lighthouse). Compound adjectives in ME and Early NE continued to be formed in accordance with the same patterns as in OE: “back formation” is a process of word-building based on analogy: televise from television.: narrowing and widening of meanings.
Modern English is called the period of “lost” endings: singen→sing.
The division is based on a feature both phonetic (weakening of sounds) and morphological (loss of unstressed vowel, weakening and loss of gram. morphemes).NE is divided into:
1)New English of Modern English. Period (1500-1610) – early modern English . The period of Shakespeare.
2)Late English of Modern English (1660-…). The transition from one state to another is slow and gradual.