Grammatical Categories. The Use of Cases

THE NOUN

§ 151. The OE noun had two grammatical or morphological cate­gories: number and case. In addition, nouns distinguished three genders, but this distinction was not a grammatical category; it was merely a classifying feature accounting, alongside other features, for the division of nouns into morphological classes.

The category of number consisted of two members, singular and plural. As will be seen beiow, they were well distinguished formally in all the declensions, there being very few homonymous forms.

The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accu­sative. In most declensions two, or even three, forms were homonymous, so that the formal distinction of cases was less consistent than that of numbers.

§ 152. Before considering the declension of nouns, we shall briefly touch upon the meaning and use of cases.

The functions of cases in OE require little explanation for the Russian student, since they are those which ought to be expected in a language with a well-developed case system.

§ 153. The Norn, can be loosely defined as the case of the active agent, for it was the case of the subject mainly used with verbs denoting activ­ity; the Norn, could also indicate the subject characterised by a cer­tain quality or state; could serve as a predicative and as the case of ad­dress, there being no special Vocative case, e. g.:

pjet flod weox pa and abaer upp t> one arc — subject, active agent ('that flood increased then and bore up the arc')

wearp pa гё1с pins cwices adrenct — subject, recipient of an actionj> r state ('was then everything alive drowned')

He wis swipe spedi3 man —predicative ('He was a very rich man") Sunu min, hlyste mlnre lare — address ('My son, listen to my teach-

ing')-

§ 154. The Gen. case was primarily the case of nouns and pronouns serving as attributes to other nouns. The meanings of the Gen. were very complex and can only roughly be grouped under the headings " Subjec­tive" and " Objective" Gen. Subjective Gen. is associated with the pos­sessive meaning and the meaning of origin, e. g.: 3rendles dsda 'Grendel's deeds' kiora scipu 'their ships' Beowulf зeata 'Beowulf of the Geats'.

Objective Gen. is seen in such instances as p& s tandes sceawun$ 'surveying of the land'; and is associated with what is termed " parti­tive meaning" as in sum hund scipa 'a hundred of ships', hiisa selest 'best of the houses'. The use of the Gen. as an object to verbs and adjec­tives was not infrequent, though the verbs which regularly took a Gen. object often interchanged it with other cases, cf-: he bad... westanwindes 'he waited for the west wind' frise menn ne motan weal dan heora sylfra 'free men could not control themselves' (also with the Acc, wealdan hie..).

§ 155. Dat. was the chief case used with prepositions, e«g.: on тогъеппе 'in the morning* from £ гёт here 'from the army*

Pa sende se сутпз to pS-m here and him cypan het 'then sent the king to the army and ordered (him) to inform them'. The last example illustrates another frequent use of the Dat.: an in­direct personal object.

The OE Dat. case could convey an instrumental meaning, indicat­ing the means or manner of an action:

hit ha.'.olade stanum 'it hailed (with) stones'

worhte Alfred cynins I])tie werede seweorc 'King Alfred built de­fence works with a small troop*.

Alongside the Acc., Dat. could indicate the passive subject of a state expressed by impersonal verbs and some verbs of emotion:

him jelicode heora peawas 'he liked their customs' (lit. 'him pleased their customs').

§ 156. The Acc. case, above all, was the form that indicated a rela­tionship to a verb. Being a direct object it denoted the recipient of an action, the result of the action and other meanings:

se wulf nimp and todaclp pa sciap 'the wolf takes and scatters the

(Itf use as an object of impersonal verbs, similar to the use of Dat., is illustrated by hine nanes pinges ne lyste " nothing pleased him'). Besides these substantival functions the oblique cases of OE nouns, especially the Acc. case, could be used in some adverbial meanings, _e> g. to indicate time or distance:

pa saeton hie pone winter aet Cwatbryc3e 'then stayed they that win­ter at Cwatbridge'

let him ealne we3 pset weste land on past steor-bord 'was all the way the desolate land on the right side of the ship' (ealne we3 was later sim­plified to always).

§ 157. It is important to note that there was considerable fluctuation in the use of cases in OE. One and the same verb could be construed with different cases without any noticeable change of meaning. The semantic functions of the Gen., Dat. and Acc. as objects commonly overlapped and required further specification by means of prepositions. The vague meaning of cases was of great consequence for the subsequent changes of the case system.

Morphological Classification of Nouns.

Declensions

§ 158. The most remarkable feature of OE nouns was their elaborate system of declensions, which was a sort of morphological classification. The total number of declensions, including both the major and minor types, exceeded twenty-five. All in all there were only ten distinct endings (plus some phonetic variants of these endings) and a few relevant root- vowel interchanges used in the noun paradigms; yet every morphologi­cal class had either its own specific endings or a specific succession of markers. Historically, the OE system of declensions was based on a number of distinctions: the stem-suffix, the gender of nouns, the phonet­ic structure of the word, phonetic changes in the final syllables.

§ 159. In the first place, the morphological classification of OE nouns rested upon the most ancient (IE) grouping of nouns according to the^- stem-suffixes (see § 66, 67). Stem-suffixes could consist of vowels (vo­calic stems, e. g, a-stems, i-stems), of consonants (consonantal stems, e. g. rc-stems), of sound sequences, e. g. -ja-stems, -fid-stems. Some groups of nouns had no stem-forming suffix or had a " zero-suffix"; they are usually termed " root-stems" and are grouped together with conso­nantal stems, as their roots ended in consonants, e. g. OE man, boc (NE man, book).

The loss of stem-suffixes as distinct component parts had led to the formation of different sets of grammatical endings (see § 67). The merg­ing of the stem-suffix with the original grammatical ending and their Phonetic weakening could result in the survival of the former stem-suf- in a new function, as a grammatical ending; thus л-stems had many

forms ending in -an (from the earlier -*eni, -*enaz, etc.); u-stems had the inflection -u in some forms.

Sometimes both elements — the stem-suffix and the original end­ing — were shortened or even dropped (e. g. the ending of the Dat. sg -e from the earlier -*ai, Nom. and Acc. pi -as from the earlier -6s; the zero-ending in the Nom. and Acc. sg) in a-stems.

§ 160. Another reason which accounts for the division of nouns into numerous declensions is their grouping according to gender. OE nouns distinguished three genders: Masc., Fem. and Neut. Though ori­ginally a semantic division, gender in OE was not always associated with the meaning of nouns. Sometimes a derivational suffix referred a noun to a certain gender and placed it into a certain semantic group, e. g. abstract nouns built with the help of the suffix -pu were Fem. — OE len^pu, hghpu (NE length, height), nomina agentis with the suffix -ere were Masc. — OE fiscere, bocere (NE fisher, 'learned man'). The follow­ing nouns denoting human beings show, however, that grammatical gender did not necessarily correspond to sex: alongside Masc. and Fem. nouns denoting males and females there were nouns with " unjustified" gender, cf.:

OE widuwa, Masc. ('widower') — OE widowe, Fem. (NE widow);

OE spinnere, Masc. (NE spinner)—OE spinnestre, Fem. ('female spinner'; note NE spinster with a shift of meaning) and nouns like OE w'tf, Neut. (NE wife), OE rnee^den Neut. (NE maiden, maid), OE wif- man, Masc. (NE woman, originally a compound word whose second com­ponent -man was Masc.).

In OE gender was primarily a grammatical distinction; Masc., Fem. and Neut. nouns could have different forms, even if they belonged to the same stem (type of declension).

The division into genders was in a certain way connected with the division into stems, though there was no direct correspondence between them: some stems were represented by nouns of one particular gender, e. g. o-stems were always Fem., others embraced nouns of two or three genders.

§ 161. Other reasons accounting for the division into declensions were structural and phonetic: monosyllabic nouns had certain peculiar­ities as compared to polysyllabic; monosyllables with a long root-syl­lable (that is, containing a long vowel plus a consonant or a short vowel plus two consonants — also called " long-stemmed" nouns) differed in some forms from nouns with a short syllable (short-stemmed nouns).

§ 162. Table 1 shows the morphological classification of OE nouns and the hierarchial application of the main features which account for this division (division of nouns into mono- and polysyllables is not in­cluded; see the descriptions of the declensions below).

The paradigms of nouns belonging to the main types of OE declen­sions are given in Tables 2, 3 and 4.

The majority of OE nouns belonged to the a-stems, c-stems and n- stems. Special attention should also be paid to the root-stems which displayed specific peculiarities in their forms and have left noticeable traces in Mod E.

§ 163. a-stems included Masc. and Neut. nouns. About one third of OE nouns were Masc. й-stems, e. g. cniht (NE knight), ham (NE home), tniip (NE mouth)\ examples of Neut. nouns are: lim (NE limb), hits (NE house), pin*. (NE thing). (Disyllabic nouns, e. g. finder, differed from monosyllabics in that they could drop their second vowel in the oblique cases: Nom. sg fInzer, Gen. finures, Dat. finye, NE finger.)

As seen from Table 2 the forms in the д-stem declension were dis­tinguished through grammatical endings (including the zero-ending). > n some words inflections were accompanied by sound interchanges: nouns with the vowel lae] in the root had an interchange [se~a], since in some forms the ending contained a back vowel, e. g. Nom. sg dieз, Gen. dse^es — Nom. and Gen. pi da^as, da^a (for the origin of the in­terchange see § 117). If a noun ended in a fricative consonant, it became voiced in an intervocal position, cf. Nom. sg тйр, wulf— [9], [fl — and Nom. pi mUpas, wulfas — 1Й], [vj (see § 139). (Note that their mod­ern descendants have retained the interchange: NE mouth — mouths IG-^cS], wolf — wolves, also house — houses and others.) These inter­changes were not peculiar of a-stems alone and are of no significance as grammatical markers; they are easily accountable by phonetic reasons.

^J ^ 97

DECLENSION OF NOUNS «Strong Declensions (Vocalic Stems)

Consonantal Stems

Note should be taken of the inflections -es of the Gen. sg, -as of the Nom. and Acc. Masc. Towards the end of the OE period they began to be added to an increasing number oS nouns, which originally belonged to other stems. These inflections are the prototypes and sources of the Mod E pi and Poss. case markers -(e)s and -s.

§ 164. Neut. a-stems differed from Masc. in the pi of the Nom. and Acc. cases. Instead of -as they took -u for short stems (that is nouns with a short root-syllable) and did not add any inflection in the long-stemmed variant—see Nom. and Acc. pi of scip and dear in the table. Consequent­ly. long-stemmed Neuters had homonymous sg and pi forms: deor — < teor, likewise sceap — sceap, pin$ — pin$, has — AOs. This peculiarity of Neut. a-stems goes back to some phonetic changes (see § 132) in final unaccented syllables which have given rise to an important grammati­cal feature: an instance of regular homonymy or neutralisation of num­ber distinctions in the noun paradigm. (Traces of this group of a-stems have survived as irregular pi forms in Mod E: sheep, deer, swine.)

§ 165. wa- and ja-stems dilfered from pure a-stems in some forms, as their endings contained traces of the elements -}- and -w-. Nom. and Acc. sg could end in -e which had developed from the weakened -/- (see ende in Table 2), though in some nouns with a doubled final consonant it was lost — cf. OE bridd (NE bird)-, in some forms -/- is reflected as -i- or -13-, e. g. Nom. sg here, Dat. herie, her$e, or heri^e ('army'). Short- stemmed ша-stems had -a in the Nom. and Acc. sg which had developed from the element -oj- but was lost after a long syllable (in the same way as the plural ending of neuter a-stems described above); cf. OE bearu. (NE bear) and cneo; -w- is optional but appears regularly before the endings of the oblique cases (see the declension of cneo in Table 2).

§ 166. o-stems were all Fem., so there was no further subdivision according to gender. The variants with -j- and -w- decline like pure d-stems except that -w- appears before some endings, e. g. Nom. sg scea- du, the other cases — sceadwe (NE shadow). The difference between short- and long-stemmed o-stems is similar to that between respective a-stems: after a short syllable the ending -u is retained, after a long syllable it is dropped, cf. wund, talu in Table 3. Disyllabic o-stems, like a-stems, lost their second vowel in some case forms: Nom. sg ceaster, the other cases ceastre ('camp', NE -caster, -Chester — a component of place- names). Like other nouns, 5-stems could have an interchange of voiced and voiceless fricative consonants as allophones in intervocal and final position: 5lof — 3(0/6 tf— v] (NE glove). Among the forms of o-stems there occurred some variant forms with weakened endings or with end­ings borrowed from the weak declension — with the element -n- — wun- dena alongside wunda. Variation increased towards the end of the OE period.

§ 167. The other vocalic stems, i-stems and u-stems, include nouns of different genders. Division into genders breaks up i-stems into three declensions, but is irrelevant for xj-stems: Masc. and Fem. «-stems de­cline alike, e. g. Fem. duru (NE door) had the same forms as Masc. sunu shown in the table. The length of the root-syllable is important for both stems; it accounts for the endings in the Nom. and Acc. sg in the same way as in other classes: the endings -e, -и are usually preserved in short- stemmed nouns and lost in long-stemmed.

Comparison of the i-stems with a-stems reveals many similarities. Neut. i-stems are declined like Neut. ja-stems; the inflection of the Gen. sg for Masc. and Neut. i-stems is the same as in a-stems es; along­side pi forms in-г we find new variant forms of Masc. nouns in -as, e. g. Nom., Acc. pi — winas 'friends' (among Masc. i-stems only names of peo­ples regularly formed their pi in the old way: Dene, En$le, NE Danes, Angles). It appears that Masc. {-stems adopted some forms from Masc. a-stems, while Neut. i-stems were more likely to follow the pattern of Neut. a-stems; as for Fem. t-stems, they resembled o-stems, except that the Acc. and Nom. sg were not distinguished as with other i-stems.

§ 168. The most numerous group of the consonantal stems were n-stems or the weak declension, n-stems had only two distinct forms in the sg: one form for the Nom. case and the other for the three ob­lique cases; the element -n- in the inflections of the weak declension was

a direct descendant of the old stem-suffix -n, which had acquired a new, grammatical function, л-stems included many Masc. nouns, such as p₀₅a, cnotta, steorra {NE bow, knot, star), many Fem. nouns, e. g. ci- rice, eorpe, heorte, hlsefdi$e (NE church, earth, heart, lady) and only a few Neut. nouns: ёа$а (NE eye).

§ 169. The other consonantal declensions are called minor conso­nantal stems as they included small groups of nouns. The most impor­tant type are the root-stems, which had never had any stem-forming suffix. In Early OE the root-vowel in some forms was subjected to pho­netic changes: if the grammatical ending contained the sound Ц], the vowel was narrowed and/or fronted by palatal mutation (see § 125 ff). After the ending was dropped the mutated vowel turned out to be the only marker of the form. Cf. the reconstructed forms of Dat. sg and Nom., Acc. pi of fot (NE foot)-. *feti, *fetiz (from earlier *fati, *fotiz) and their descendants in OE — fei, fet. The interchange of root-vowels had turned into a regular means of form-building used similarly with inflections (see the forms of fot and mus in Table 4). This peculiarity of the root- stems is of considerable consequence for later history and has left traces in Mod E. (Irregular pi forms — men, women_x teeth and the like come from the OE root-stem declension.)

§ 170. Among the other consonantal stems we should mention a small group of nouns denoting family relationship with the stem-suffix e. g. brdpor, fwder, niodor (NE brother, father, mother). They commonly had a mutated vowel in the Dat. sg: breper, lost the second vowel in some forms like other disyllabic nouns: brop- mm, modra and employed some endings adopted from other stems, e.g. fscleras — Nora., Acc. pi (cf. -as in o-stems).

§ 171. Another small group of nouns is known as s-stems, though in OE, as veil as in other West and North G languages this [s] had long changed into [г]. Only a few Neut. nouns remained in that group In OE, e. g. lamb, cealf, cild (NE lamb, calf, chitd). In the sg they were declined like Neut. a-stems, but in the' pi had a specific inflection, not to be found outside that group: their stem-suffix -s, transformed into -r, had survived as part of the inflection: Nom. pi lambru. Gen. lambra, Dat. lambrum, Acc. lambru. ([r] In the pi form of children in Mod E is a trace of the stem-suffix -r).

§ 172. It may be concluded that for all its complicated arrangement the system of noun declensions lacked consistency and precision. There were many poly- functional and homonymous markers in the paradigms. The distinction between morphological classes was not strict. Some forms were alike in all the declensions (namely, -a and -um for the Gen. and Dat. pi), many forms acquired new analogical variants under the influence of the more numerous classes or variants with phonetically weakened endings, which eliminated the differences between the declensions and between the forms within the paradigm. Towards the end of the OE period formal variation grew and the system tended to be re-arranged according to gender on the basis of the most influential types: a-stems, л-stems and d-stems.

The distinction of forms in the paradigms was inconsistent. None'of the declen­sions made a distinction between eight forms — for two numbers and four cases; some declensions distinguished between five forms, others — between three or even two. Nom. and Acc. p! had the same form in all the declensions. In the sg there were two main ways of case differentiation: one common form for the Nom. and the Acc, and two distinct forms for the Dat. and Gen.; or else—one common form ■ or the three oblique cases, distinct from the Nom. The difference between the two numbers — sg and pi —was shown with greater precision.