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COPYRIGHT 2006 Adam Mickiewicz University
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the use of potential source lexemes of future markers in Old English, such as willan, sculan, beon and weorpan. First their frequency is analysed in a selection of texts from the OE part of the Helsinki Corpus and compared to the frequency of their cognate forms in Old High German. This quantitative analysis is followed by an examination of the use of these verbs in their respective construction types. In this way it will be demonstrated why in Old English willan and sculan were more suitable candidates for grammaticalisation as auxiliaries to denote future time than beon and weorpan.
1. Theoretical preliminaries
According to Bybee et al. (1994: 244) a future gram signals "... a prediction on the part of the speaker that the situation in the proposition, which refers to an event taking place after the moment of speech, will hold". Markers of futurity are not necessarily grammatical means. There can be lexical units or pragmatic expressions that signal future reference as well. Such markers are often polyfunctional, having future as only one of their uses. Furthermore, they can exist in layers with or without functional specification that vary in their degree of grammaticalisation.
In Modern English futurity can be expressed by will/shall, be going to, the present progressive or the simple present. This formal variability is the main reason why the existence of a future tense in Modern English is sometimes questioned.
Bybee et al. (1994: 244) distinguish between two types of futures according to their source structures:
1) Primary Futures:
It is commonly argued that OE had only two tenses: a past and a non-past. Futurity is expressed by the present tense and additional lexical or pragmatic means. On the other hand, the verbs willan, sculan, weorpan and beon, as well as the verbal prefix ge- are often referred to as conveying a future meaning.
This raises the following two questions: (1) To what extent did there exist suitable source lexemes/constructions for grammaticalisation? (2) To what extent had they already been grammaticalised?
The history of will and shall as prime exponents of futurity in English is discussed in more or less detail in most handbooks on English historical syntax and in many treatments on the history of English modals (cf. e.g. Jespersen 1919; Mustanoja 1960; Kisbye 1971; Berndt 1982; Arnovick 1990; van Kemenade 1993). OE weorpan is mainly dealt with in connection with passive markers. It is often claimed that passive constructions with weorpan in the present tense have a future connotation (Kilpio 1989: 61-62; Mitchell 1985: [section] 755; Visser 1973: [section] 1918). Similarly, the use of OE beon for future states of being or statements of eternal truth is often mentioned in passing but hardly ever elaborated any further. The aspectual character of OE/OHG prefixed verbs, especially those with ge-/gi-, and their potential force to refer to future events is mentioned e.g. in Streitberg (1891), Bloomfield (1929), Mosse (1938), Brunner (1965), Lindemann (1965), Leiss (1992), Lass (1994), Eroms (1997), Wischer--Habermann (2005). Nevertheless, the development of will and shall into future grams in English is more or less taken for granted without considering other potential alternative sources in OE.
The restructuring of the English aspectual system and the loss of the verbal prefixes let us exclude the prefixed verbs from our analysis. An aspectual future based on perfective aspect markers could not develop in English. That leaves us with the potential source lexemes will, shall, weorpan and beon. We assume that for a successful grammaticalisation at least two preconditions are jointly relevant:
1) the frequent use of the source lexeme > leading to semantic and phonetic attrition
2) its occurrence in a suitable construction type > leading to reanalysis
Therefore we analysed first the frequency of the relevant items and second the construction types in which they were used in OE and OHG text corpora. The English data are based on a selection of texts from the OE part of the Helsinki Corpus. It comprises about 80 000 word forms of text segments dating from 880-1120.
* AB = Alfred's Boethius (ca. 880): about 11 000 word forms, West Saxon dialect,...
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