1.4.2. Evolution of grammatical categories

All old Germanic languages were synthetic characterized by well-developed verbal paradigm. Old Germanic verbs were marked by the following grammatical categories: person, number, tense, mood and voice.

The category of person was realized in Old Germanic languages through a system of personal endings, which were the most important structural elements in a verbal paradigm being polysemantic.

Not all Germanic languages preserved the entire paradigm of personal endings. The languages marked by the most stability of personal endings were Gothic, OHG and OIcel, where the endings for the following forms can be singled out: 1) present indicative active; 2) present and past subjunctive; 3) preterite indicative active; 4) present indicative mediopassive; 5) present subjunctive mediopassive.

In the course of evolution the category of person was weakened by the reduction of final syllables. Due to analogy in some languages (modern Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, partially Faroese), the personal endings in the past tense were levelled that resulted on the loss of the category of person in this tense. Icelandic is the only language that preserved personal endings in the past tense sg. and pl.

Several Germanic languages had no differentiation in the category of person in plural.

The category of number was expressed by the same series of endings. Initially Germanic verb had 3 numbers: singular, dual and plural. Later dual was eliminated.

The category of tense was formed by the opposition of two tenses - Present and Past (both in Indicative and Subjunctive active). There was no Future tense. The Imperative had no tense differentiation.

The twofold system of oppositions is considered to be a typological feature of all Germanic languages. Two tenses were found, for example, in Gothic, Old English and Old High German. The only language chat showed deviation from the typological system of tenses in Old Germanic languages was Old Icelandic, which developed three more tenses: perfect I, perfect II and future.

In other old Germanic languages the Present tense had a wide sphere of usage and could refer to several types of actions: 1) the process which takes place at the moment of speaking; 2) future actions; 3) timeless process.

The binary opposition of tense forms in old Germanic languages had a tendency to be enriched. Analytical tense forms combining auxiliary and notional verbs started to appear (e.g. in Gothic wisan “to be” and haban “have” + Participle II; Gothic duginnan “begin”, skulan “shall”, haban “have” + infinitive for future tense; in Scandinavian munu, skulu + infinitive for future, etc.).

The category of mood was represented by the indicative, the imperative and the subjunctive. This opposition was asymmetrical for two reasons. First, the Imperative had no time correlation. Second, the homonymous forms eliminated the distinction between the Imperative and the Subjunctive.

The forms were mostly inherited from PIE, though several innovative features were introduced.

The category of voice was represented by the opposition ‘active – mediopassive’.

The synthetic mediopassive forms existed in Proto-Germanic and were inherited by Gothic.

The specificity of mediopassive forms is that they were passive in their meaning which possessed the form of Gothic weak verb Class IV and Participle II of transitive verbs used as predicative with the verbs wisan "to be" and wairÞan “to become”.

Almost the same structure was developed as a form of passive voice in all other Germanic languages. In modern Germanic the category of voice is marked by some peculiarities developed in some of them. For example, modern Scandinavian languages are divided into two-voice (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) and three-voice (Icelandic, Faroese) languages. Three-voice languages have two types of the passive voice (synthetic, the forms of which are built with the help of passive morpheme –s < -sk, and analytical form of passive, built according to the structure mentioned above).