Weak verbs built their principal forms by adding the dental suffix,
-d
or
-t
, to the
Present Tense stem. All weak verbs were divided into 3 classes; the variant of the
dental suffix and the ending added to build the principal forms of the weak verb
depended on the class to which the verb belonged.
A peculiar place within the OE morphological system was taken by preterite
present verbs. Their present tense corresponds to the past of strong verbs, while their
past is derived according to the past of weak verbs. Thus, in OE the present tense of
the verb
witan
‗
know‘ is
wāt
for the Singular and
witon
for the Plural, while its past is
wisse
or
wisste
.
In OE there were twelve preterite-present verbs. Six of them survived in MnE:
OE
ā
Ʒ
; cunnan, cann; dear( r ); sculan, sceal; ma
Ʒ
an
,
m
æƷ
; m
ō
t
(MnE
owe, ought;
can; dare; shall; may; must
). Most of the preterite-presents did not indicate actions,
but expressed a kind of attitude to an action denoted by another verb, an Infinitive
which followed the preterite-present. In other words, they were used like modal
verbs, and eventually developed into modern modal verbs. (In OE some of them
could also be used as notional verbs).
In OE there were two non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the
Participle. In many respects they were closer to the nouns and adjectives than to the
finite verb; their nominal features were far more obvious than their verbal features,
especially at the morphological level.
The Infinitive had no verbal grammatical categories. Being a verbal noun by
origin, it had a sort of reduced case-system: two forms which roughly corresponded
to the Nominative and Dative cases of nouns.
The Participle was a kind of verbal adjective which was characterized not only
by nominal but also by certain verbal features.
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