Конспект лекций по дисциплине «История языка (англ.)» для студентов специальности «Иностранная филология»

In OE the finite verb had no category of voice. Only in the system of verbals the Participles Present and Past were contrasted as having an active and a passive meaning.

The analytical passive forms developed from OE phrases consisting of OE beōn (NE be) and weorðan (become) and Participle 2 of transitive verbs. OE beōn was used as a link-verb with a predicative expressed by Participle 2 to denote a state resulting from a previous action. The Participle in OE agreed with the subject in number and gender.

The ME beōn plus Past Participle developed into an analytical form. It could express not only a state but also an action. The formal pattern of the Passive Voice is found in the Future tense, in the Perfect forms, in the Subjunctive Mood and in the non-finite forms of the verb.

In Early NE the Passive Voice continued to grow and to extend its application. There arose passive constructions whose subject corresponded to other types of objects: indirect and prepositional Passive forms began to be built from transitive verbs associated with different kinds of objects: as indirect and prepositional.

Perfect Forms

Like other analytical forms of the verb, the Perfect forms have developed from OE verb phrases.

The main source of the Perfect form consisted of the verb habban (NE have), a direct object and Participle 2 of a transitive verb, which served as an attribute to the object. The participle like other attributes agreed with the noun-object in Number, Gender and Case. The verb habban was used not only with participles but with verbs taking prepositional objects.

Towards ME the verb phrase turned into analytical forms and made up a single set of forms termed “perfect”. The Participles had lost their forms of agreement with the noun. The Participle stood close to the verb have and was followed by the object which referred to the analytical form as a whole. By the age of the Renaissance the perfect forms had spread to all parts of the verb system.

The stabilization of the formal pattern of the perfect was the important stage in the formation of a new verbal category, termed the category of time correlation. The main function of the Perfect forms was to indicate a completed action. For a long time the Perfect forms were used as synonyms of the Simple Past. But towards the age of Shakespeare the contrast between the Perfect and non-Perfect forms became more obvious. The priority and relevance for the subsequent situation became the domain of the Perfect forms and the meaning of the non-Perfect forms was narrowed.