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