An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

auxiliary. At least for the present I shall, nevertheless, assume that their
primary classification was as full verbs. This is quite easy to maintain in
terms of morphology, but I shall come back to the issue in the chapters
on syntax. And the category of modal auxiliary verbs, also, is far from
identical in Old and present-day English. This is true both in terms
of syntax and also morphology, and therefore it might seem perverse to
claim a continuous category stretching from Old English to the present-
day. Yet, as we shall see, there are common core characteristics whose
continuous presence helps us also to understand the undoubted struc-
tural differences over time.
The first two groups, exemplified in present-day English by verbs such
as love and ride respectively, cause fewer problems. The biggest change
here is that the number and variety of strong verbs has declined steadily
in the intervening period. One such example is help, which was a strong
verb in Old English (and for some of the Middle English period too).
Turning now to the inflectional structure, what we shall find is that
there is not the radical set of changes that occurred amongst the nouns
and adjectives. This, it seems to me, makes the entry point for under-
standing verbs slightly less daunting than that for, say, nouns. Verbs
inflect for the following features: person, tense and mood. Only the last
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will be at all unfamiliar. It refers to the inflections referring to the three
moods, indicative, imperative and subjunctive and also to voice, to
which I shall return shortly. I shall discuss the significance of each of
these later, but for the moment we only need the briefest of notes. The
indicative is what we might call the ‘normal’ mood. It gives the set of
inflections which are used in ordinary declarative sentences and used
everywhere except where some other inflection is required. It is, as it
were, the default mood. The imperative, also, is probably familiar to
you, although whereas in present-day English it is uninflected, in Old
English it was inflected, as we shall see.
The subjunctive, however, may well be unfamiliar, although it is
widely used in languages such as German and French. It is also used in,