Peter Petre & Hubert Cuyckens, Leuven, Belgium
Hubert.Cuyckens@arts.kuleuven.be
The Copula construction in Old and Middle English:
On the interaction between constructions and lexicon
As is well known, grammaticalization theory typically focuses on constructions in which at least one lexical item remains constant across constructional instances, and on their development – a representative example is the development of grammatical meanings in the going to-construction. Diachronic construction grammar is wider in scope (cf. Noël 2006): not only does it include these “partially substantive” constructions, it also involves the emergence of schematic or higher-level constructions, and their development, once established. It is within this approach that we will address the following two issues.
(i) The schematization (by speakers) of existing partially substantive constructions, and, once established, the productive use of these schematic constructions, enabling the emergence of new lexemes in the lower-level constructional instances;
(ii) the impact of constructional change on the lexicon (a topic less studied).
On the basis of corpus data from the YCOE, YPC, TC, PPCME2, MEC and HC (see references), these issues are explored by examining the development of low-level, substantive copula constructions in Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME). Examples of instances of such constructions involving the verb weorðan are given in (A)-(E).
(A) Intransitive (‘arise, happen’) Sona wearð micel eorðbyfung, (c1075)
‘Immediately a great earthquake occurred’
(B) Copula + PP hit ... cisum wyrðe to wlættan (c1075)
‘for the fastidious it will turn into nausea.’
(C) Copula + AP ond þæt wæter wearð wearm. (c1000)
‘and the water became hot.’
(D) Copula + NP heo wearð þæs minstres abbud. (c1025)
‘she became abbess of that nunnery.’
(E) Aux. + passive participle Contwara burge ... wearð fyre onbærned. (c900)
(denoting change of state) ‘Canterbury ... got burned by the fire.’
With regard to the first issue, we will show that a fully schematic copula construction first emerged on the basis of the distribution of the grammaticalized verbs wesan, beon and weorðan and became increasingly productive from late OE on, with copulas such as weaxan, becuman, turnen, growen etc. Evidence for the unitary status of the OE schematic construction is found in:
1. the syntactic similarity between constructions (C) and (E): adjectival agreement features are found on past participles:
(1) heora bendas.NOM-M-PL sona wurdon forswælede.NOM-M-PL (c1050)
‘their fetters immediately got burned up.’
2. the coordination of different types of subject complement introduced by a single copula:
(2) and hys flæsc wearð eall gesett.PPLE and hal.ADJ geworden. (c1075)
‘And his flesh had become entirely set and sound’
With regard to the second issue: It has been observed that in OE/ME a separate passive construction developed which split from the original Copula construction (Denison 1985). We will investigate what the effect is of this constructional split of a single, schematic Copula construction into a new, schematic Copula construction and a schematic Passive construction on the lexical items in these constructions. We will argue that this split can explain the rapid decrease in ME of both weorðan and beon. As regards the Passive construction for instance, it is likely that these verbs, with semantics denoting [+change], no longer fit the empty semantics of the new passive auxiliary slot.
In general, we will show how diachronic construction grammar might account for the loss of function words, whose disappearance cannot be accounted for by mechanisms invoked to explain the loss of content words, such as expressivity enhancement or change of communicative needs.
References
Denison, D. 1985. ‘Why Old English had no prepositional passive’. English Studies 66 (3), 189-204.
HC: Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic Part (ICAME, version 2). 1999. Matti Rissanen et al. Helsinki: Department of English.
MEC: Middle English Compendium. http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/mec/ [20.07.2006].
Noël, D. 2006. Diachronic construction grammar vs. grammaticalization theory (Leuven Preprints, 255).
Leuven: Department of linguistics.
PPCME2: Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 2nd edition. Anthony Kroch. Pennsylvania: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/mideng [18.02.2005].
Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies (http://www.press.umich.edu/webhome/healey/siteform.html [27.01.2006]).
YCOE: The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. 2003. Ann Taylor et al. York: Department of Language and Linguistic Science.
YPC: York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry. 2001. Susan Pintzuk and Leendert Plug. York: Linguistics Department.
