HOTEL Lecture 8.3 — Middle English Morphology: The Verb and its Non-finite Forms

Why does -ing do two different jobs: I am reading and I like reading? The last part of Lecture 8 covers the Middle English verb: the categories it kept, the rise of the analytic forms (the future with shall and will, the perfect with have, the passive with be), the personal endings, the decline of the strong verbs and how four principal parts became three, and the origin of went. It then turns to the non-finite forms: the infinitive and its particle to, Participle I and the verbal noun, which merged in -ing and produced the gerund, and Participle II. It ends with a summary of the whole lecture and the answers to its three questions. Lecture 8 of the course History of the English Language (HOTEL), for third-year students of English Philology at Vasyl Stefanyk Carpathian National University. Lecturer: Lesya Ikalyuk, PhD.