22 Morphological classification of verbs in me and ne

During the Middle English period some dramatic changes in the structure of all morpho-syntactic categories took place, making the English from one thousand years ago show increasingly more resemblance to the English of today. As far as the verb is concerned, the two key changes which affected it when passing from Old English to Middle English were:1) the reduction of inflectional endings, and 2) the shift of strong verbs to the weak paradigm.

The Middle English verb in different syntactic contexts could take a finite (inflected) or a non-finite (uninflected) form. The finite forms were inflected by means of suffixation, ie. the addition of inflectional morphemes to the end of the stem of a word, for the following verbal subcategories: mood: indicative, subjunctive, imperative; tense: present, past; number: singular, present; person: first, second, third.

The non-finite forms, ie. the forms unmarked for tense, number and person, were: infinitive, past participle, present participle and gerund. From around Chaucer's time the last two obtained more or less regularly the same ending -ing and so started to be formally indistinguishable though functionally still different (Lass 1992: 144). Syntactically, the infinitive and gerund functioned as nouns and the participles as adjectives. On the basis of their inflections ME verbs are commonly classified into three groups: two major ones, traditionally referred to as strong and weak, and a third one comprising a number of highly irregular verbs (here referred to as MAD verbs, see below). The basic difference between the first two groups lies in the way they form their past tense and past participle. Strong verbs build them by means of a root vowel alternation (the so-called ablaut) and the past marker of weak verbs is a dental suffix (usually -t, -d or -ed) attached to the root, after which the inflectional endings marking the number/person are added.

The third of the aforementioned groups consists of verbs that display a high degree of irregularity and, according to Fisiak (1968: 99), may be further subdivided as follows: 1.Mixed, whose past inflections are partly strong and partly weak, represented by only one verb: dn 'do'.2. Anomalous, undergoing suppletion, that is the replacement of one stem with another one, when forming the past and, in some cases, the present tense forms, eg. gn 'go', bn 'be'. 3. Defective, whose chosen principal categories are lacking or extremely rare. None of them, for instance, has the present participle and many lack the infinitive. All of them, except for will, are the continuation of Old English preterite-presents. Can/con 'I can', dar 'I dare' can be quoted as the examples of such verbs.

23. Oe Strong verbs

The majority of OE verbs fell into two great divisions: the strong verbs and the weak verbs. Besides these two main groups there were a few verbs which could be put together as “minor” groups. The main difference between the strong and weak verbs lay in the means of forming the principal parts, or “stems” of the verb. The strong verbs formed their stems by means of ablaut and by adding certain suffixes; in some verbs ablaut was accompanied by consonant interchanges. The strong verbs had four stems, as they distinguished two stems in the Past Tense – one for the 1st and 3rd p. sg Ind. Mood, the other – for the other Past tense forms, Ind. and Subj. the weak verbs derived their Past tense stem and the stem of Participle II from the Present tense stem with the help of the dental suffix -d- or -t-; normally they did not interchange their root vowel, but in some verbs suffixation was accompanied by a vowel interchange. Minor groups of verbs differed from the weak and strong verbs. Some of them combined certain features of the strong and weak verbs in a peculiar way (“preterite-present” verbs); others were suppletive or altogether anomalous.

Strong Verbs The strong verbs in OE are usually divided into seven classes. Classes from 1 to 6 use vowel gradation which goes back to the IE ablaut-series modified in different phonetic conditions in accordance with PG and Early OE sound changes. Class 7 includes reduplicating verbs, which originally built their past forms by means of repeating the root-morpheme; this doubled root gave rise to a specific kind of root-vowel interchange. The principal forms of all the strong verbs have the same endings irrespective of class: -an for the Infinitive, no ending in the Past sg stem, -on in the form of Past pl, -en for Participle II.

Strong verb indicate tense by a change in the quality of a vowel. They are original(germ. Europ). Restrictive group of verb. Oe – over 300Sv. 1 class –i class, a. 2 class-u-classu+root=diphthong,. Root consonant changed(rotasism). 3,4 class- the gradation was caused by consonant.(breaking), 6- qualitative-quantities ablaut 7 class –reduplication of the root-morpheme. They use form of conjugation known as ablaut. And this form of conjugation the stem of the word change to indicate the tense.

24. Origin of Modern English irregural verbs.

Strong Verbs and their Development

As far as the strong verbs were a non-productive class, some strong verbs turned into weak with time, i.e. started to employ -t/-d suffix in their form-building (e.g. to climb, to help, to swallow, to wash, etc.). Thus in NE only 70 strong verbs out of 300 in OE remained.

The strong verbs were subdivided into 7 classes according to the type of vowel gradation/ablaut.

The classes that survived best through different periods of the history were classes 1, 3, 6:

Class 1	Infinitive		Past Sg		Past Pl		Participle 2
OE	wrītan		wrāt		writon		writen
ME	writen		wrot		writen		writen
NE	write		wrote				written
Class 3		Infinitive		Past Sg		Past Pl		Participle 2
OE		findan		fand		fundon		funden
ME		finden		fand		founden		founden
NE		find		found				found
Class 6	Infinitive		Past Sg		Past Pl		Participle 2
OE	scacan		scoc		scōcon		scacen
ME	shaken		shook		shoken		shaken
NE	shake		shook				shaken

Analysing the tables above, we can see that the following changes occurred:

In ME the inflections -an, -on, -en were all reduced to just one inflection  -en.

In NE the ending -n was lost in the Infinitive and preserved in the Participle 2 in order to distinguish these two forms.

In NE Past Singular and Past Plural forms were unified, usually with the Singular form preferred as a unified form because Past Plural and Participle 2 often had similar forms and it was hard to distinguish them (e.g. ME writen (Past Pl) – writen (Part. 2)) the category of Number disappeared in the Verb.

In ModE the subdivision into classes was lost though we still can trace some peculiarities of this or that class in the forms of the irregular verbs.