Morphological Classification of Old English Verbs

The above table of conjugation of verbs shows that the means of building grammatical forms differed in Old English for different groups of verbs. Most forms were made by means of vowel interchange or grammatical suffixes accompanied (or not) by inflections; one form - Participle 2 was formed either by vowel interchange or by a suffix and was sometimes marked by prefix. In addition, there are verbs that had suppletive forms.

The majority of Old English verbs fell into two great divisions: the strong verbs and the weak verbs. In addition to these two main groups there were a few verbs which could be put together as "minor" groups. The main difference between these groups lies in the way they form the principal forms- besides there were a few other differences in conjugation. Accordingly, the verbs may be divided into the following groups: strong, weak, preterite-present, suppletive.

The strong verbs formed their stems by means of vowel gradation and by adding certain inflections and suffixes; in some verbs gradation was accompanied by changes of consonants, but these were mainly due to the activity of assimilative phonetic processes of the period (assimilation before t, loss of consonants, rhotacism or Verner's Law). There were four basic forms (stems) of the strong verbs, and the use of the stems was as follows:

I - the stems with this vowel are used in the infinitive, the present tense indicative and subjunctive, the imperative mood and participle I;

II - in the past tense singular, the 1^st and the 3^rd person

III - in the past tense plural, 2^nd person singular and Past Subjunctive

IV- in the form of the Participle II.

The weak verbs derived their Past tense stem and that of Participle II by adding dental suffix -d- and -t- normally they did not change their root vowels apart from the cases when assimilative changes split these sounds into diphthongs.

In the preterite-present forms both ways were used; these verbs will be mentioned separately.

Suppletive verbs are what their name implies - they formed their forms from different stems or had peculiarities in formation of their paradigm. Two anomalous verbs beon/wesan and don’t have other peculiarities of the paradigm.