2.7. Development of the verbals

The system of verbals in OE consisted of the infinitive and two participles. Their nominal features were more pronounced than their verbal features, the infinitive being a sort of verbal noun, participles I and II, verbal adjectives.

The main trends of their evolution in ME and NE can be defined as gradual loss of most nominal features (except syntactical functions) and growth of verbal features. The simplifying changes in the verb paradigm and the decay of the OE inflectional system resulted in the loss of case distinctions in the infinitive and of forms of agreement in the participles.

The infinitive lost its inflected form (the so-called "Dative case”) in Early ME. OE wrītan and tō wrītanne appear in ME as (to) writen, and in NE as (to) write. The endings –an,-anne were reduced to –en, -enne (due to levelling of endings). The preposition tō, which was placed in OE before the inflected infinitive to show direction or purpose, lost its meaning and changed into a formal sign of the infinitive. In ME the infinitive with to does not necessarily express purpose. In order to reinforce the meaning of purpose another preposition, for, was sometimes placed before the to-infinitive.

In ME the infinitive develops analytical forms. Compound forms of the infinitive appeared at a very early date: the passive infinitive, consisting of bēon plus participle II, is found in OE texts, though its semantic contrast to the simple form is not consistent, since the OE active infinitive, despite its form, could sometimes have a passive meaning. In ME texts we find passive and perfect infinitive in the active and passive forms, e.g.

He moste han knowen love and his servyse

And been a feestlych man as fressh as May. (Chaucer)

('He must have known love and its service and (must have) been a jolly man, as fresh as May.')

In NE (the 16^th and 17^th c.) continuous and perfect continuous forms of the infinitive appear, e.g. “…first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurril Plautus whom he confesses to have been reading not long before.”(J. Milton).

Evidently in the 17^th c. the infinitive had the same set of forms as it has in present-day English.

The participle. The distinctions between the two participles were preserved in ME and NE: participle I had an active meaning and expressed a process or quality simultaneous with the events described by the predicate of the sentence. Participle II had an active or passive meaning depending on the transitivity of the verb, and expressed a preceding action or its results in the subsequent situation.

The form of participle I in Early ME is of special interest, as it displayed considerable dialectal differences: the Southern and Midland forms were derived from the present tense stem with the help of –ing(e), while other dialects had forms in –inde, -ende and –ande. The first of these variants – finding(e), looking(e) – became the dominant form in the literary language. Participle I coincided with the verbal noun, which was formed in OE with the help of the suffixes –ung and –ing, but had preserved only one suffix, -ing in ME.

The analytical forms of participle I began to develop later than the forms of the infinitive. It was not until the 15^th c. that the first compound forms are found in the records: “The seid Duke of Suffolk being most trostid with you…” (‘The said Duke of Suffolk being most trusted by you…’) In the 17^th c. participle I is already used in all the four forms which it can build today: perfect and non-perfect, passive and active, e.g. “Now I must take leave of our common mother, the earth, so worthily called in respect of her great merits of us; for she receiveth us being born, she feeds and clotheth us brought forth, and lastly, as forsaken wholly of nature, she receiveth us into her lap and covers us.” “Julius Caesar, having spent the whole day in the field about his military affairs, divided the night also for three several uses…”

The forms of participle I made a balanced system: passive versus active, perfect versus non-perfect. Participle II remained outside this system, correlated to the forms of participle I through formal differences and certain semantic affinities and oppositions (cf. forsaken and brought in the examples above).

The gerund. The Late ME period witnessed the growth of a new verbal known in modern grammars as the gerund. The gerund can be traced to three sources: 1) the OE verbal noun in -un and -in, 2) the present participle and 3) the infinitive. In OE the verbal noun derived from transitive verbs took an object in the genitive case, which corresponded to the direct object of the finite verb: cf. OE sēo fēdin āra scēapa equivalent to ‘the feeding of the sheep’ with hīe fēdaþ þā scēap ‘they feed the sheep’. The syntactic functions of the verbal noun, the infinitive and the participle partly overlapped. In ME the present participle and the verbal noun became identical: they both ended in –ing. This led to the confusion of some of their features: verbal nouns began to take direct objects, like participles and infinitives. This verbal feature – a direct object – as well as the frequent absence of article before the –ing-form functioning as a noun, transformed the verbal noun into a gerund in the modern understanding of the term. The disappearance of the inflected infinitive contributed to the change, as some of its functions were taken over by the gerund.

The earliest instances of a verbal noun resembling a gerund date from the 12^th c. Chaucer uses the –ing-form in substantival functions in both ways: with a prepositional object like a verbal noun and with a direct object, e.g. in getynge on your richesse and the usinge hem ‘in getting your riches and using them’. In Early NE the –ing-form in the function of a noun is commonly used with an adverbial modifier and with a direct object – in case of transitive verbs, e.g.:

Tis pity… That wishing well had not a body in’t

Which might be felt (Shakespeare).

Drink, being poured out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one,

doth empty the other. (Shakespeare).

Those were the verbal features of the gerund. The nominal features, retained from the verbak=l noun, were its syntactic functions and the ability to be modified by a possessive pronoun or a noun in the genitive case:

And why should we proclaim it an hour before his entering? (Shakespeare).

In the course of time the sphere of the usage of the gerund grew; it replaced the infinitive and the participle in many adverbial functions; its great advantage was that it could be used with various prepositions, e.g.:

And now he fainted and cried, in fainting, upon Rosalind.

Shall we clap into’t roundly without hawking, or spitting, or saying we are hoarse… (Shakespeare)

Compound forms of the gerund appeared much later than those of the infinitive and the participle. The earliest instances of analytical forms of the gerund are found in the age of the literary Renaissance, when the infinitive and participle I possessed already a complete set of compound forms. The formal pattern set by the participle was repeated in the new forms of the gerund. These quotations illustrate compound forms of the gerund in the texts of the 17^th and 18^th c.:

To let him spend his time no more at home,

Which would be great impeachement to his age

In having known no travel in his youth. (Shakespeare)

Yet afraid they were, it seemed: for presently the doors had their wooden ribs crushed in pieces by being beaten together. (Th. Dekker, early 17^th c.)

This man, after having been long buffeted by adversity, went abroad. (Smollett, 18^th c.)

She begged the favour of being shown to her room. (Dickens)

The formal distinctions which had developed in the system of the verbals toward the 17^th and 18^th c. are practically the same as in Mod E. The forms of the infinitive and the –ing-form (participle I and gerund) make up grammatical categories similar to those of the finite verb: voice, time-correlation and aspect.