By collecting data from various corpora, I examine and compare the use of the Gothic haitan and Old English hātan reflexes of *haitan, a transitive verb that develops into a copula-like verb in the other Germanic languages. Between the two languages, this verb can occur in five constructions: calling, transitive naming, infinitival commanding, subclause commanding, and copular naming. Both Gothic and Early Old English share the use of this verb in calling constructions whereas the subclause commanding construction is an Old English innovation and the copular naming construction does not appear until Late Old English. Regardless of the language or period, however, when *haitan occurs in transitive naming constructions, it strongly favours passive voice, which may explain its later use in copular naming constructions. Moreover, an examination of the competitors of Gothic *haitan show that it has strong competition from various verbs in each of its functions, though the competition in the transitive naming construction is weakest.
In this paper we deal with Old English and Old High German copula constructions combining verbs denoting ‘be’ and ‘become’ with past participles, which are traditionally analysed as periphrastic passive constructions. We propose that these constructions cannot be seen as grammaticalised passives but rather as fully compositional structures. We investigate these constructions from an aspectual perspective and argue that the passive is only one of several possible readings for these constructions, though one that follows logically from certain combinations. In particular, we show that the copula verbs act as aspect operators that select different parts of the event structure of the past participle, and that transitivity is the crucial factor that gives rise to passive readings. As a conclusion, we outline a detailed corpus investigation in order to catalogue all possible readings and then ultimately make a contribution to the different developments of the passive in English and German.
The passive construction constitutes a marked difference between English, which uses the auxiliary be, and German, which uses werden ‘become’. Originally, however, both languages used both verbs. In this paper I argue, based on evidence from Old English, early Middle English, Tatian and Otfrid, that this situation changed when English and German developed different systems of boundedness. Bounded language use construes situations as completed sub-events, emphasizing narrative progress, and making abundant use of time adverbials, which split up an event chronologically and often take up the first position in a verb-second system. In German when this type of bounded language use was grammaticalised, werden grammaticalised as the only passive auxiliary, precisely because it was already predominantly used in bounded clauses. By contrast, the bounded system disappeared in English, as evidenced in the heavy decrease of time adverbials of narrative progress such as þa ‘then’, and the confusion of verb-second-syntax. Weorðan, the Old English cognate of werden, was highly entrenched in these constructions, and disappeared with them. In general, my analysis shows how the bounded-unbounded distinction makes it possible to account for a major difference in the auxiliary system between English and German.
The budding causative use of Old English habban ‘have’ has so far received little attention in the literature compared to other Old English periphrastic causatives. The construction with habban represents indirect passive causation and corresponds to the Present-Day English construction of the type I had my shoes repaired. The study is based on the entire habban material, c. 12,600 instances, from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. The material yields 19 (20) causative habban instances. After a brief look at the diachronic and dialectal breakdown of the data, the discussion focuses on syntactic features, such as word-order and the inflection/non-inflection of the past participle, and semantic features, e.g. the roles of the causer, patient and causee, the presence of volitional or deontic modality in all the instances, and the telicity/atelicity of the action expressed by the verb phrase. The article concludes with a discussion of the origin of the construction. A new hypothesis concerning the triggering of the grammaticalisation process of causative habban is presented and viewed in the light of Diewald’s context-sensitive grammaticalisation scenario.
Old English (ge)munan is one of the preterite-present verbs that became obsolete in the (strongly debated) more or less radical change into modal auxiliaries. Contrasted with those verbs that replaced the preterite-present in its lexical sense from Middle English onwards, an etymological analysis reveals gemunan to indicate an act of memory the function of which is not so much to (individually) reminisce about the past, but rather to (collectively) assess the present against the backdrop of the past. The preterite-present experienced a renaissance due to interlingual influence from Old Norse as mun was reintroduced and used as a modal especially in the northern dialects of English (cf. most prominently Sc. maun), moving steadily along the grammaticalisation cline just like the other fully-fledged modal auxiliaries. The eventual decline of mun – not only in Standard English but also in most regional varieties – can be explained from a functional perspective which also bears implications for current changes affecting the Present-day English paradigm of modality expressions.
The grammaticalisation path from possession to obligation which describes the development of haben to a marker of modality is well-established (cf. Heine/Kuteva 2002), but opinions differ on when exactly these modal readings came about. Haspelmath (1989) argues for a dating no earlier than Middle High German, but a careful study of Notker’s writings reveals evidence of modal ‘haben + zu-infinitive’ in Old High German. Following Ebert (1976), this study identifies four stages of grammaticalisation of haben with zu-infinitive. The pivotal point is reached as soon as ‘haben + zu-infinitive’ is combined with nominal complements in the genitive or dative case, which clearly evince modal meanings. Notker’s Old High German texts contain several instances of this use. Finally, the comparison with the original texts demonstrates that ‘haben + zu-infinitive’ does not derive from Latin, but rather is used independently, even in Old High German.
This article offers a paradigmatic survey of auditory evidential constructions in Old English: direct-perception constructions – accusativus cum infinitivo (ACI) introduced by the auditory (ge)hieran ‘to hear’ ((ge)hieran+ACI) – and hearsay-evidence constructions, consisting of the verb (ge)hieran with the infinitive of a verb of utterance ((ge)hieran+Inf), followed by a compliment clause, a prepositional clause, or a parenthetical. Comparative data from other Old Germanic languages suggests a common origin of both constructions. It is further hypothesised that these two do not go back to the same Proto-Germanic construction: (ge)hieran+ACI is more likely to have arisen from the reanalysis of the verbal noun in I heard his speech into an ACI with a verb of ‘speaking’ I heard him speak, while (ge)hieran+Inf could have developed from I heard the story into I heard (the) say with the verb of ‘saying’.
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 similar source lexemes for future grams, they nevertheless took diverging paths to develop a future tense, with werden in German and will/shall in English. The paper aims at comparing the earliest attestable stages of the two languages, i.e. Old High German and Old English to find out whether there are language internal differences with regard to the patterns of use of the possible source items. The database for our studies consists of OHG and OE text material dating from 790 to 1155, which we consider to be maximally comparable with respect to chronology, text type and content.
This paper examines the distribution and use of the twofold present tense paradigms of the Old English verb bēon ‘to be’ in the late West Saxon Gospels (WSG) and the Northumbrian gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels (LiGl). The analysis confirms the frequently claimed semantic distinction of the paradigms. It furthermore shows that the choice of a form of OE bēon mostly depended on the tense and mood of its Latin equivalent, but it also illustrates that the translators of the two Gospel versions took the context into account. Quantitative differences of the forms in the two manuscripts are due to multiple glosses in Lindisfarne, the use of alternative forms to OE bēon in the West Saxon Gospels and the partly different morphology of the verb in Northumbrian.
This paper is a corpus-based study of the Old English verbal prefix a- which is no longer productive in English today, but survives in a few lexical relics such as arise, awake or ashamed. After a brief discussion of previous research and the etymology of this prefix, the paper investigates a range of meanings and functions that the verbal prefix a- had in early English, showing that it was in an advanced stage of grammaticalisation and that its primary function was to express perfective aspect. The prefix is contrasted with its cognate in Gothic, as well as its equivalents in Modern English and Croatian, a Slavic language that marks aspect morphologically.
Even though we can observe striking differences in the isolating contexts of Modern English and Modern High German existential constructions, both languages feature existential constructions with locative adverbs that are the result of long processes of grammaticalisation. In Old English (OE), expletive þǣr diverged from the locative þǣr as a result of semantic and syntactic reanalysis, which led to the development of the English existential there-construction (ETC). In a similar way, Old High German (OHG) thâr, through grammaticalisation, diverged from its locative origin and gave rise to the existential da-construction. It is suggested in this paper that there was a common origin: both þǣr and thâr evolved as a compromise in the conflict between pragmatic and syntactic structure in OE and OHG, respectively. The aim is to contribute to the still small number of qualitative and quantitative studies of OE and OHG existential constructions.
The theory of language change has in recent years increased its explanatory repertoire by pointing out the role of language contact in determining which paths of development are entered and followed under specified conditions. In particular, language shifting – as unmonitored second language learning – is recognized as a powerful mechanism for introducing new verbal categories into language systems as well as leading to the loss of verbal categories from language systems. In this paper I will relate several of the most important structural changes and categorial differences in the verb systems of Proto-Germanic, Old English and Old High German to the different contact histories of these languages, among them: (1) the reduction of the Proto-Indo-European TAM system (TAM for tense, aspect, mood) to half its size in Proto-Germanic, (2) the existence of a double copular paradigm in Old English (and again in Irish English) but not in German; (3) a number of properties of English but not of German attributed to Celtic influence by Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto (2008), such as the loss of the affected possessor construction and the rise of the verbal noun in -ung/-ing and the progressive based on it.
By collecting data from various corpora, I examine and compare the use of the Gothic haitan and Old English hātan reflexes of *haitan, a transitive verb that develops into a copula-like verb in the other Germanic languages. Between the two languages, this verb can occur in five constructions: calling, transitive naming, infinitival commanding, subclause commanding, and copular naming. Both Gothic and Early Old English share the use of this verb in calling constructions whereas the subclause commanding construction is an Old English innovation and the copular naming construction does not appear until Late Old English. Regardless of the language or period, however, when *haitan occurs in transitive naming constructions, it strongly favours passive voice, which may explain its later use in copular naming constructions. Moreover, an examination of the competitors of Gothic *haitan show that it has strong competition from various verbs in each of its functions, though the competition in the transitive naming construction is weakest.
In this paper we deal with Old English and Old High German copula constructions combining verbs denoting ‘be’ and ‘become’ with past participles, which are traditionally analysed as periphrastic passive constructions. We propose that these constructions cannot be seen as grammaticalised passives but rather as fully compositional structures. We investigate these constructions from an aspectual perspective and argue that the passive is only one of several possible readings for these constructions, though one that follows logically from certain combinations. In particular, we show that the copula verbs act as aspect operators that select different parts of the event structure of the past participle, and that transitivity is the crucial factor that gives rise to passive readings. As a conclusion, we outline a detailed corpus investigation in order to catalogue all possible readings and then ultimately make a contribution to the different developments of the passive in English and German.
The passive construction constitutes a marked difference between English, which uses the auxiliary be, and German, which uses werden ‘become’. Originally, however, both languages used both verbs. In this paper I argue, based on evidence from Old English, early Middle English, Tatian and Otfrid, that this situation changed when English and German developed different systems of boundedness. Bounded language use construes situations as completed sub-events, emphasizing narrative progress, and making abundant use of time adverbials, which split up an event chronologically and often take up the first position in a verb-second system. In German when this type of bounded language use was grammaticalised, werden grammaticalised as the only passive auxiliary, precisely because it was already predominantly used in bounded clauses. By contrast, the bounded system disappeared in English, as evidenced in the heavy decrease of time adverbials of narrative progress such as þa ‘then’, and the confusion of verb-second-syntax. Weorðan, the Old English cognate of werden, was highly entrenched in these constructions, and disappeared with them. In general, my analysis shows how the bounded-unbounded distinction makes it possible to account for a major difference in the auxiliary system between English and German.
The budding causative use of Old English habban ‘have’ has so far received little attention in the literature compared to other Old English periphrastic causatives. The construction with habban represents indirect passive causation and corresponds to the Present-Day English construction of the type I had my shoes repaired. The study is based on the entire habban material, c. 12,600 instances, from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. The material yields 19 (20) causative habban instances. After a brief look at the diachronic and dialectal breakdown of the data, the discussion focuses on syntactic features, such as word-order and the inflection/non-inflection of the past participle, and semantic features, e.g. the roles of the causer, patient and causee, the presence of volitional or deontic modality in all the instances, and the telicity/atelicity of the action expressed by the verb phrase. The article concludes with a discussion of the origin of the construction. A new hypothesis concerning the triggering of the grammaticalisation process of causative habban is presented and viewed in the light of Diewald’s context-sensitive grammaticalisation scenario.
Old English (ge)munan is one of the preterite-present verbs that became obsolete in the (strongly debated) more or less radical change into modal auxiliaries. Contrasted with those verbs that replaced the preterite-present in its lexical sense from Middle English onwards, an etymological analysis reveals gemunan to indicate an act of memory the function of which is not so much to (individually) reminisce about the past, but rather to (collectively) assess the present against the backdrop of the past. The preterite-present experienced a renaissance due to interlingual influence from Old Norse as mun was reintroduced and used as a modal especially in the northern dialects of English (cf. most prominently Sc. maun), moving steadily along the grammaticalisation cline just like the other fully-fledged modal auxiliaries. The eventual decline of mun – not only in Standard English but also in most regional varieties – can be explained from a functional perspective which also bears implications for current changes affecting the Present-day English paradigm of modality expressions.
The grammaticalisation path from possession to obligation which describes the development of haben to a marker of modality is well-established (cf. Heine/Kuteva 2002), but opinions differ on when exactly these modal readings came about. Haspelmath (1989) argues for a dating no earlier than Middle High German, but a careful study of Notker’s writings reveals evidence of modal ‘haben + zu-infinitive’ in Old High German. Following Ebert (1976), this study identifies four stages of grammaticalisation of haben with zu-infinitive. The pivotal point is reached as soon as ‘haben + zu-infinitive’ is combined with nominal complements in the genitive or dative case, which clearly evince modal meanings. Notker’s Old High German texts contain several instances of this use. Finally, the comparison with the original texts demonstrates that ‘haben + zu-infinitive’ does not derive from Latin, but rather is used independently, even in Old High German.
This article offers a paradigmatic survey of auditory evidential constructions in Old English: direct-perception constructions – accusativus cum infinitivo (ACI) introduced by the auditory (ge)hieran ‘to hear’ ((ge)hieran+ACI) – and hearsay-evidence constructions, consisting of the verb (ge)hieran with the infinitive of a verb of utterance ((ge)hieran+Inf), followed by a compliment clause, a prepositional clause, or a parenthetical. Comparative data from other Old Germanic languages suggests a common origin of both constructions. It is further hypothesised that these two do not go back to the same Proto-Germanic construction: (ge)hieran+ACI is more likely to have arisen from the reanalysis of the verbal noun in I heard his speech into an ACI with a verb of ‘speaking’ I heard him speak, while (ge)hieran+Inf could have developed from I heard the story into I heard (the) say with the verb of ‘saying’.
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 similar source lexemes for future grams, they nevertheless took diverging paths to develop a future tense, with werden in German and will/shall in English. The paper aims at comparing the earliest attestable stages of the two languages, i.e. Old High German and Old English to find out whether there are language internal differences with regard to the patterns of use of the possible source items. The database for our studies consists of OHG and OE text material dating from 790 to 1155, which we consider to be maximally comparable with respect to chronology, text type and content.
This paper examines the distribution and use of the twofold present tense paradigms of the Old English verb bēon ‘to be’ in the late West Saxon Gospels (WSG) and the Northumbrian gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels (LiGl). The analysis confirms the frequently claimed semantic distinction of the paradigms. It furthermore shows that the choice of a form of OE bēon mostly depended on the tense and mood of its Latin equivalent, but it also illustrates that the translators of the two Gospel versions took the context into account. Quantitative differences of the forms in the two manuscripts are due to multiple glosses in Lindisfarne, the use of alternative forms to OE bēon in the West Saxon Gospels and the partly different morphology of the verb in Northumbrian.
This paper is a corpus-based study of the Old English verbal prefix a- which is no longer productive in English today, but survives in a few lexical relics such as arise, awake or ashamed. After a brief discussion of previous research and the etymology of this prefix, the paper investigates a range of meanings and functions that the verbal prefix a- had in early English, showing that it was in an advanced stage of grammaticalisation and that its primary function was to express perfective aspect. The prefix is contrasted with its cognate in Gothic, as well as its equivalents in Modern English and Croatian, a Slavic language that marks aspect morphologically.
Even though we can observe striking differences in the isolating contexts of Modern English and Modern High German existential constructions, both languages feature existential constructions with locative adverbs that are the result of long processes of grammaticalisation. In Old English (OE), expletive þǣr diverged from the locative þǣr as a result of semantic and syntactic reanalysis, which led to the development of the English existential there-construction (ETC). In a similar way, Old High German (OHG) thâr, through grammaticalisation, diverged from its locative origin and gave rise to the existential da-construction. It is suggested in this paper that there was a common origin: both þǣr and thâr evolved as a compromise in the conflict between pragmatic and syntactic structure in OE and OHG, respectively. The aim is to contribute to the still small number of qualitative and quantitative studies of OE and OHG existential constructions.
The theory of language change has in recent years increased its explanatory repertoire by pointing out the role of language contact in determining which paths of development are entered and followed under specified conditions. In particular, language shifting – as unmonitored second language learning – is recognized as a powerful mechanism for introducing new verbal categories into language systems as well as leading to the loss of verbal categories from language systems. In this paper I will relate several of the most important structural changes and categorial differences in the verb systems of Proto-Germanic, Old English and Old High German to the different contact histories of these languages, among them: (1) the reduction of the Proto-Indo-European TAM system (TAM for tense, aspect, mood) to half its size in Proto-Germanic, (2) the existence of a double copular paradigm in Old English (and again in Irish English) but not in German; (3) a number of properties of English but not of German attributed to Celtic influence by Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto (2008), such as the loss of the affected possessor construction and the rise of the verbal noun in -ung/-ing and the progressive based on it.