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Part of
Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade
Edited by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 243] 2017
► pp. 213–239

Chapter 10
The rise and fall of the passive auxiliary weorðan in the history of English

| Meertens Institute Amsterdam
This paper gives a quantative analyisis of the dynamics of the passive auxiliary weorðan favouring passive BE in the history of English. Weorðan displays a rise-and-fall pattern rather than a decline pattern: it forms a peak, which is interpreted as a ‘failed change’. This failed change turns out to be dynamically connected to another failed change: the rise-and-fall of strict V2 in Old English. The connection between strict V2 and the need of weorðan (and its counterparts) is considered: (1) language-internally in Dutch (dialects), (2) cross-linguistically in Romance and Germanic, (3) diachronically for Old and Middle-English. By using a Giorgi/Pianesi-style syntactic projection of Reichenbachian S,E,R-events, we provide a model that includes V2 and the passive diathesis, which predicts this correlation.
Article outline
  • 1.The decline of weorðan in English
    • 1.1The problem
    • 1.2Previous approaches
  • 2.Sensitivity to tense/aspect periphrasis
    • 2.1Aspect sensitivity in Dutch (dialects)
      • 2.1.1Standard Dutch
      • 2.1.2Passives of causative constructions in Dutch and Middle Dutch
      • 2.1.3WERDEN in Dutch dialects
    • 2.2Aspect sensitivity in Rhaeto-Romance
    • 2.3Aspect sensitivity in Old French
  • 3.Comparative data from Germanic and Romance
    • 3.1 Werden/ be and tense/aspect periphrasis
    • 3.2 Werden, be and V2
  • 4.Diachronic analysis of English weorðan
    • 4.1Main clause versus embedded clauses
    • 4.2 Diachrony of weorðan
    • 4.3 Diachrony of strict-V2
  • 5.On the grammatical connection between werden and strict V2
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Corpora used
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.10pos
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