Grammatical Categories of the Verbals

§ 195.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 verbal nature of the Infinitive and the Participle was revealed in some of their functions and in their syntactic "combinability": tike finite forms they could take direct objects and be modified by ad­verbs.

§ 196.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 Nom. and the Dat. cases of nouns — beran — uninfected Infinitive ("Nom." case) tō berenne or tō beranne — inflected Infinitive ("Dat." case) Like the Dat. case of nouns the inflected Infinitive with the prepo­sition to could be used to indicate the direction or purpose of an action, e.g.:

Maniʒe cōmen tō bycʒenne pā pinʒ ‘many (people) came to buy those things’

pæt weorc is swipe plēolic mē ... tō underbeʒinenne ‘that work is very difficult for me to undertake’.

The uninflected Infinitive was used in verb phrases with modal verbs or other verbs of incomplete predication, e. g.; hie woldon hine forbærnan ‘they wanted to burn him’ pū meaht sinʒan ‘you can sinʒ’ (lit. "thou may sing") pa onʒon hē sōna sinʒan ‘then began he soon to sing’.

§ 197.The Participle was a kind of verbal adjective which was char­acterised not only by nominal but also by certain verbal features. Par­ticiple I (Present Participle) was opposed to Participle II (Past Parti­ciple) through voice and tense distinctions: it was active and expressed present or simultaneous processes and qualities, while Participle II ex­pressed states and qualities resulting from past action and was contrast­ed to Participle I as passive to active, if the verb was transitive. Parti­ciple II of intransitive verbs had an active meaning; it indicated a past action and was opposed to Participle I only through tense. The trans­lations of the Participles in Table 10 explain the meanings of the forms (for the forms of Participles see also Table 9 in § 190).

Table 10

Participles in Old English

As seen from the tables the forms of the two participles were strictly differentiated. Participle I was formed from the Present tense stem (the Infinitive without the endings -an, -ion)with the help of the suffix -ende. Participle II had a stem of its own — in strong verbs it was marked by a certain grade of the root-vowel interchange and by the suffix -en; with weak verbs it ended in -d/-t (see morphological classification of verbs § 199 ff.) Participle II was commonly marked by the prefix ʒe, though it could also occur without it, especially if the verb had other word-building prefixes, e. g.

§ 198. Participles were employed predicatively and attributively like adjectives and shared their grammatical categories: they were de­clined as weak and strong and agreed with nouns in number, gender and case. Sometimes, however, they remained uninfected. Cf. the following examples:

Hie hæfdon hira cyninʒ āworpenne ‘they had their king deposed’ — Participle II is in the Acc. sg Masc, strong declension — it agrees with cyrtinʒ:

Ic nāt hwāēnne mine daʒas āʒāne bēop ‘I don't know when my days will be over’ (lit. "my days are gone") — āʒāne agrees with daʒas.

hæfde sē cyninʒ his fierd on tū tōnumen ‘had that king his army into two (halves) divided’ — the participle is uninllected, though the noun fierd (Fem., Acc. sg) suggests the ending -e.

It is probable that lack of agreement with participles-predicatives and with participles used in predicative constructions after habban (‘have’) testifies to the gradual transition of these phrases into compound verb forms.