The perfect tense and the forms of past participle in old english

The paper deals with peculiarities ofusing the possessive verb habban + inflected participle II. On the basis of the sample of Old English prose texts we analyze the frequency distribution of instances throughout the periods (dates) which manuscripts from the corpus belong to. We also provide a detailed analysis of semantic and syntactic properties of inflected participles used as part of the construction ‘ habban + participle II’. Assuming that the semantics of this construction with both inflected and uninflected participles was meaningful, it is suggested to make distinction between the meaning of ‘ habban + participle II’ with inflected participles and with uninflected participles as similar to the semantic shades which can be traced when adjectives are used either attributively or predicatively. The proposed distinction between inflected and non-inflected participles used within the investigated construction retains its resultant-state semantics but brings in certain distinctive shades of meaning in characteristics of the subject and/or object. In particular, an inflected participle indicates durative immanent features of the subject and/or object (similar toattributive characteristics of adjectives), whereas a non-inflected participle describes the subject and/or object based on the model of predicative usage of adjectives emphasizing its contextual, ad hoc, temporaryfeature.