- •1. Linguistic features of Germanic languages: vowels.
- •Indo-European short o and a appear as short a:
- •3. Linguistic features of Germanic languages: consonants.
- •4. Me phonetics: vowel (reduction, shortening/lengthening,
- •5. The Earliest Period of Germanic History
- •6. Me phonetics. Developm. Of Old English diphthongs inМe
- •7.Basic grammatical features of Germanic languages. Runes
- •8. The Great vowel shift. R
- •Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of Germanic languages. It represented a change in the long vowels.
- •9. Chronological division in the history of English. Short survey of periods.
- •10. New English Phonetics: loss of unstressed –e, the change of –er into –ar, a into ǽ. Rise of new phonemes.
- •11. Old English. Historical background.
- •3 Gramm. Categories:
- •12. Ne phonetics: the 17th century changes.
- •13. Old and Modern Germanic languages.
- •14. Middle and New English noun: morphological classification, grammatical categories.
- •15. Old English Dialects and Written Records.
- •16. Origing of modern irregular noun forms
- •17. Oe phonetics: vowels ( breaking, diphtongization, palatal mutation, shortening/lengthening).
- •18. Me & ne adjective and pronoun
- •19. Oe phonetics: consonants (voicing of fricatives, rhotasism, palatilizatin, metathesis, loss of consonants in certain position).
- •20. Middle and New English adverb, Numeral, the Article.
- •21. Oe Verb. Grammatical categories and morphologiacal classification.
- •22 Morphological classification of verbs in me and ne
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.