An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

modal verb – see auxiliary verb.
morpheme – minimal unit of grammatical structure. (The morpheme is often
defined as the minimal meaningful unit of language but that definition leads
to problems, as explained in Section 3.5.)
morphology – area of grammar concerned with the structure of words and with
relationships between words that involve the morphemes that compose
them.
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mutation – see umlaut.
negative concord – negation falls not only on a verb phrase but also on any
other appropriate element in the clause, as in non-standard present-day
English I didn’t see nothing.
nominal – belonging to the word class ‘noun’, or having the characteristics of a
noun.
nominative case – grammatical case exhibited by a noun phrase functioning
as the subject of the verb, and usually (but by no means always) expressing
semantically the agent of the action that the verb denotes.
nucleus – see syllable.
number – grammatical category associated especially with nouns. In English,
‘plural’ and ‘singular’ numbers are distinguished inflectionally (e.g. ‘cats’
versus ‘cat’). In Old English there was also a dual category, occasionally used
with pronouns and adjectives.
onset – see syllable.
orthography – the spelling system of a language.
parataxis – where two syntactic units are linked together by juxtaposition and
without any conjunction.
passive – see voice.
paradigm – the set of forms associated with a noun or an adjective in forming a
declensional class, or with a verb in a conjugational class.
past – see tense.
person – grammatical category associated especially with pronouns, identifying
individuals in relation to the speaker and hearer. English distinguishes ‘first
person’ (I, we), ‘second person’ (you) and ‘third person’ (he, she, it, they).