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COPYRIGHT 2006 Adam Mickiewicz University
ABSTRACT
The present paper based on Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" offers a historical analysis of the semantic development of ME shulen with particular attention paid to the emergence of its future and epistemic senses. The study will juxtapose the analysis of OE sculan with ME shulen. In the drawn comparison, the paper will indicate that OE sculan was contextually contingent and constituted a structure, contrary to ME shulen which was contextually free. Moreover, the development of the ME sense of futurity when compared with the OE sense of prophecy, is to be viewed as the increase in the level of abstractness via defocusing of the divine conceptual subject.
Furthermore, the present study will illustrate that the mechanism that affected the changes and led to the grammaticalisation process where neither purely metaphorical nor metonymic but metaphorical perspectivised metonymically thereby giving rise to "the emerging metaphor" (Radden 2003).
1. Introduction
The present paper offers a historical analysis of the semantic development of the ME verb shulen with particular attention paid to the emergence of its future and epistemic senses.
The present study, by drawing on theories represented by Traugott (1989), Barcelona (2003) and Radden (2003) illustrates the analysis of ME shulen in the light of its rise to futurity and epistemicity. The aims of the paper are the following.
To begin with, the study will attempt to prove that the sense of prophecy in OE sculan and of futurity in ME shulen, though semantically linked, were related to different conceptual structures. Hence, the emphasis will be put on the mechanisms involved in the modification of the structure in ME shulen when compared with OE seulan. Consequently, even though the study aims to illustrate the semantic development of ME shulen, yet a brief characterisation of OE sculan seems a necessary tool to pinpoint all the modifications in the conceptual structure ofshulen that emerged not until ME period.
The paper will indicate that OE sculan was contextually contingent, and formed a conceptual structure contrary to ME shulen, which was contextually free and ceased to constitute a structure. Moreover, the development of ME sense of futurity is to be viewed as the increase in the level of abstractness, hence as the evolution of former conceptual structure via defocusing of the divine conceptual subject.
Furthermore, the present study will illustrate that the mechanisms that affected the changes in the analysed structures, and led to the grammaticalisation process, were metaphorical based on metonymy, thereby giving rise to the "emerging metaphor" Radden (2003). Therefore, the study will emphasise that the development of ME shulen should neither be viewed in terms of purely metaphorical nor metonymic changes but rather as the...
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