Old English Verbs of Tasting with Accusative/Genitive/Of-Phrase

Old English verbs of tasting like beorgan, drincan and etan may take the accusative, the genitive or the of-phrase. The number of occurrences of these verbs with the genitive or the of-phrase is not so large, but we notice the fact that Latin ex-/de-phrases could be rendered by the of-phrase and that both the genitive and of-phrase were used in a partitive sense. In this short paper I try to show that the Old English genitive object was in the process of being replaced by the of-phrase even in a limited context.