The unfinished cline of grammaticalisation? Reflections on the uses of OE under and its derivatives.(LINGUISTICS)

ABSTRACT

A lexical category under functioned in Old English as a preposition, an adverb or a member of a compound. This raises the questions: of whether and, if so, to what extent did these different uses undergo a process of grammaticalisation? On the basis of the observations of language material I assume that the cline of changes has never reached a final stage and either the process has been interrupted or is still in the making, which requires a fundamental rethink of the problem.

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In my article about the semantics of under compounds I came to a conclusion that "once a lexical unit extends its basic sense, or is substantially modified by, for example, a prefixal element it may enter a completely different semantic domain" (Nagucka 2000: 210). This short essay continues my attempts to show the important and still poorly understood complexities of the semantic changes of the OE word morpheme under and its derivatives. In Old English it was customarily classified either as a preposition or an adverb depending on its structural behaviour and was used to indicate location or motional direction. The preposition according to Latin grammarians (Pristianus and Donatus) is always used with another word. In AElfric's grammar we read:

 
1) Praepositio is foresetnyss, se byd gedeod naman and worde and 
   stent aefre on foreweardan              (AElfric's grammar 10: 15). 
 
   'Preposition is a fore-setting. It is associated with a noun and 
   a verb and allways stands in the fore'. (1) 
 
It governs the L ablative (OE dative), e.g. 
 
2) sub arbore sto 
   under treowe ic stande                  (AElfric's grammar 274: 3). 
   'I stand under the tree.' 
 
or the L accusative (OE accusative), e.g. 
 
3) Drihten ne eom ic wyrde p pu 
   ingange under mine pecene       (Matthew 8:8, Anglo-Saxon version). 
 
   drihter (sic) nam ic wyrde p du inngae 
   domine non sum dignus ut intres 
   under rof min 
   sub tectum meum                              (Lindisfarne version). 
 
   drihten nam ic wyrde p du ga under pacu minne (Rushworth version) 
   'Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof' 
 
                                                 (Authorised version). 

This view has been common for centuries and reached its acme in the methodological art of structuralism in the mid 1950s, when the preposition was treated as a function word almost deprived of semantic content. With the development of generative linguistics the role of the preposition was discovered and promoted to a subcategory of the verb (Geis), or later to the rank of a former content category, which together with the verb, noun and adjective constitute an essential grammatical structure whose syntactic features determine the underlying phonological and logical forms ready for phonological and semantic interpretations (e.g. Chomsky 1982, 1995). Of the other novel trends in linguistic thought it is the cognitive approach together with psycholinguistic achievements that devote most attention to the preposition as a bearer of spatial relations. But all these theoretical concepts do not resolve the problems which involve such questions as why and how changes have taken place; however, they do contribute to the expectations of the researcher who would like not only to touch historical language data, but to find explanations as well. A promising resolution to the problem seems to come in the theory of grammaticalisation enriched with some ideas of psycholinguistic science. This has offered methods for a provisional search for root causes of the problem; and now, I shall concentrate on this point. (2)

To go back to the OE data, it has been agreed that under indicates spatial relations when two entities are involved (see examples (2) and (3)), i.e. as a preposition; it can also be used adverbially when applied to a verb. AElfric's grammar defines the adverb as: