1.

Old English grammar: parts of speech, their grammatical categories and

morphological classes, syntax, word order.
OE was an inflected type of language: it showed the relations between words and expressed
other grammatical meanings mainly with the help of simple grammatical forms. Grammatical
endings were certainly the principal form-building means used: they were found in all the
parts of speech that could change their form: they were usually used alone but could also
occur in combination with other means. The use of prefixes in grammatical forms was rare
and was confined to verbs. Suppletive forms were restricted to several pronouns, a few
adjectives and a couple of verbs.
The parts of speech t be distinguished in OE are as follows: the noun, the adjective, the
pronoun, the numeral, the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction and the
interjection.
Five nominal grammatical categories: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison and the
category of definiteness/indefiniteness.

NOUN – two gram. categories: number (single, plural), and case (Nominative, Genetive,
Dative and Accusative). Morphological classification: based on stem-suffixes, gender and
length of the root-syllable
THE PRONOUN
Personal pronoun Demonstrative pronoun

Other classes of pronouns: interrogative (hwa and hwaet – had a four case paradigm =
who,what), indefinite (an and aeniз = one, any. nan = none, nanpinз = nothing), personal
(he) and demonstrative (se) could be used as connectives.

THE ADJECTIVE.
Grammatical categories: number, gender, case.
THE VERB
Grammatical classification:
SYNTAX:
The syntactic structure of OE was determined by 2 conditions: the nature of morphology and
the relations between the written and spoken forms of the language. OE was a synthetic
language: it possessed a system of grammatical forms which could indicate the connection
between words, it was priamry spoken, there fore the written forms of the language
resembled oral speech – unless the text were literal translations from Latin or poems with
stereotyped constructions.
WORD ORDER:
The order of words in the OE santence was free, it was often determined by logical and
stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints.Neverless, the order of words could
depend on the communicative type of the sentence – question versus statement, on the type
of clause, on the presence and place of some secondary parts of the sentence. Inversion was
used for grammatical purposes in questions: full inversion with simple predicates and partial
– with compound predicates, containing link-verbs and modal verbs.

2. Etymological characteristics of the Old English vocabulary and ways of

enriching it in Old English: word-building, borrowing.
Word structure in OE:
The bulk of OE voc were native words. In the course of the OE period the voc. grew: it was
mainly replenished from native sources.
According to their morphological structure OE words fell into 3 main types:
- Simple words or words with a simple stem, containing a root-morpheme and no
derivational affixes
- Derived words consisting of one root-morpheme and one or more affixes
- Compound words, whose stems were made up of more than one root morpheme