영어 동사 굴절에 관한 연구

The Inflection of English Verbs

This paper intends to describe and generalize the inflection of English verbs. Like their Modern English counterparts, Old English verbs were either weak, adding a -d or -t to form their preterits and past participles or stong, changing their stressed vowel for the same purpise. Old Enflish had several kinds of weak verbs and seven groups of strong verbs distinguished by their patterns of vowel change; and it had a considerably larger number of strong verbs than has Modern English. Old Enflish also had a fair number of irregularity being frequent at all periods in the history of language, rather than a recent “corruption.” In Middle English verbs continued to conform to the Germanic division into strong and weak, as they still do. Although the vowels of endings were leveled, the gradational distinctions expressed in the root vowels of the strong verbs were fully preserved. The tendency to use exclusively one or the other of the preterit vowel grades, however, had begun, though there was little consistency.