The Old English (OE) pre-modals willan and *sculan are generally considered less grammaticalized than their Modern English counterparts will and shall; nevertheless they most often function as auxiliary verbs (cf. Wischer, 2006: 173). Their present tense forms have already been studied in… read more
This paper is a comparative corpus-based study of constructions that had the potential of marking future events in Old High German (OHG) and Old English (OE), i.e. modal constructions and those with be/become-verbs. Given the fact that both languages stem from a common source and probably had… read more
This paper commences by characterizing the exceptionality of the Old English double paradigm of sL and bLforms of the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense among the (West) Germanic languages, followed by an analysis of the use of beon and wesan in the Old English section of the Helsinki Corpus with a… read more