Lecture 14 Old English Grammar

Old English was a synthetic language as the relations between words and grammatical meanings were shown and expressed with the help of simple grammatical forms.

The main or principal form-building means were grammatical endings, sound interchange in the root, prefixes and suppletive formation. They were found in all parts of speech and could be used in combination with each other.

In sound interchanges, vowel interchange was more common than interchange of consonant. The use of prefixes was confined to verbs.

In OE the distinguished parts of speech were as follows: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral, the verb, the adverb, the prepositions, the conjunction and the interjection.

Grammatical categories are usually subdivided into nominal categories, found in nominal parts of speech and verbal categories found in the finite verb.

There were 5 nominal grammatical categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison and the category of definiteness/ indefiniteness. Each part of speech had its own categories. The noun had 2 grammatical categories proper: number and case.

The adjective had the maximum number of categories – five.. Verbal grammatical categories were tense, mood, number and person.

The OE noun had 2 grammatical categories: number and case. The nouns also distinguished 3 genders but this distinction was not a grammatical category. The category of number consisted of two members: singular and plural.

The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative. The Nominative was the case of the active agent.

The Genitive case was the case of nouns and pronouns serving as attributes to other nouns.

The Dative was the chief case used with prepositions.

The accusative was the form that indicated a relationship to a verb. It denoted the recipient of an action, the result of the action, indication of time or distance.