The Distribution of the Perfect Auxiliaries be/have in Middle English Texts
Like many Germanic languages, English has developed specific periphrastic constructions to express perfective meaning. Before being fully grammaticalized in the 16th century, they were used occasionally in Old and Middle English as complex verb phrases with either habban ‘to have’ or beon/wesan ‘...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Institute of English Studies
2018-10-01
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| Series: | Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies |
| Online Access: | http://www.anglica.ia.uw.edu.pl/images/pdf/27-2-articles/Anglica-27-2-2-Zdziera.pdf |
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| Summary: | Like many Germanic languages, English has developed specific periphrastic constructions
to express perfective meaning. Before being fully grammaticalized in the 16th century,
they were used occasionally in Old and Middle English as complex verb phrases with
either habban ‘to have’ or beon/wesan ‘to be’ acting as auxiliary verbs. By the Modern
English period, forms created with be disappeared from the language and were almost
completely replaced by forms with have, a process which did not occur, for instance, in
German. As the data on this development are quite scarce, a relatively simple model is
assumed with a steady diachronic progress towards the system established in Modern
English, a model which disregards synchronic variation. This paper attempts to investigate
the distribution of the perfective constructions with be and have, especially in the 15th
century texts and to identify the main factors accounting for differences in their usage. Instead
of taking into account only the diachronic aspect of the development described, the
present study focuses mainly on investigating the synchronic variation in the auxiliaries
used with the two most frequent verbs of motion, namely come and go in the perfective
meaning |
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| ISSN: | 0860-5734 0860-5734 |