3.3The verbal group

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gradually lost their person and number inflections (except for the third-person singular), which according to some linguists has had further repercussions on word order (e.g Roberts, 1993; for discussion of this issue see Lightfoot, 1997; Warner, 1997; this volume, Section 5.3). Secondly some of the functions that were originally expressed synthetically (e.g. ‘mood’ by subjunctive endings, ‘aspect’ by the presence or absence of affixes such as ge-, be- and a-) needed to be reexpressed, usually by means of a periphrastic construction. Once periphrastic constructions had entered, others followed in their wake, often clarifying forms that had served a double purpose, such as the present tense form in OE, which was used to refer both to the present and the future. In many cases these periphrastic constructions had already arisen in OE as ‘exploratory expressions’ (Harris and Campbell, 1995: 72–5) – syntagms which may arise due to a wish for emphasis or clarity, mistakes in the application of grammatical rules, etc., and may or may not become part of the grammar through a process of grammaticalisation. This is indeed what we see happening in English. A number of exploratory expressions are around in OE to mark more clearly or expressively the functions that have so far been mainly expressed by mood, aspect or tense affixes. The eventual loss of these affixes is partly the result of phonetic attrition and pidginisation (see Chapter 1), but no doubt was accelerated by the availability of such ‘exploratory expressions’. As is usual in grammaticalisation, we at first see competition among the new periphrastic forms to fill a specific function, later followed by the selection of one of the competing forms, and then its further grammaticalisation (in the form of bleaching of referential meaning, and phonetic reduction), after which the whole cycle may start again. As an example, consider what happened to the OE subjunctive towards the end of the OE period. The original OE synthetic subjunctive forms became opaque (because of syncretism with indicative forms), and already existing ‘modal’ verbs (often termed ‘pre-modals’, because they lacked many of the properties associated with the PDE modals), such as cunnan ‘can’, *sculan ‘shall’ and magan ‘may’, began to take their place. These then gradually lost their full-verb (lexical) meanings and became restricted to deontic, dynamic and epistemic uses. As a consequence, they lost some of their verbal characteristics (infinitival, participial and ‘pure’ tense forms), which in turn led to a new cycle, i.e. the introduction of what are often called ‘quasi-modal’ verbs, such as have to, be able to, etc., to fill the syntactic gaps that the core modals had left.

In the following subsections, we will look at the main verbal categories of tense, aspect, mood and voice and describe the extensive changes that have taken place in these areas. One separate section will be devoted to one of the most remarkable developments in English, the grammaticalisation of the verb do to an empty operator, which was in many ways a result of the rise of so many new periphrastic constructions. A final section will deal with the ever-increasing array of auxiliaries within the verb phrase, and the relation between them, represented by strict ordering principles that developed in the course of time.

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present tense was also the form normally used to refer to future time, (21b), and to past time that extends up to the moment of speaking, (21c), where PDE would prefer a perfect (but cf. Irish English, which still uses a present here, as do most Germanic languages).

It could be said that grammatical tense forms are redundant because the time at which an action takes place is usually clear from the context. As we can see from the examples in (21), it is the adverbials or conjunctions (siððan, on ðæm þriddan dæge, for manegum wintrum) that help us to place an event in time. In English the choice between a pastor present-tense form has always been obligatory (later in ME, a perfect tense was added as another ‘past’; note, however, that the perfect is in many ways aspectual too; more about this in Section 3.3.2); in other words one or the other has to surface in each utterance. This has not been the case, however, with the future tense.

In OE there was no future tense, as noted above, and even in PDE its use is not always obligatory. A present tense can be used, in many contexts, such as a temporal clause referring to the future (When you [*will] go out, please close the door) or when the future is seen as more or less definite or planned (The train leaves at six). What we see, then, in the development of English future markers is that *sculan and willan are reinterpreted first from original dynamic and/or deontic modals, probably through some kind of pragmatic inferencing or double modal marking, into more general future markers expressing possibility or strong likelihood. Traugott (1992: 196) gives an example such as:

in which necessity is, as it were, doubly expressed, which allows the modal of ‘obligation’ sceal to become bleached into a ‘weaker’ future modal. Such

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grammaticalising further into a general future marker. The case is different with be going to, which has indeed become a very general future marker in PDE, more and more bleached of its earlier concrete locative/directional meaning and in the twentieth century reduced phonetically to gonna.

Although present and past tense are often linked to present and past time, this is not necessarily so, as we saw with the subjective use of the past in (19) above. The past can also be used in present-tense contexts to refer to a hypothetical situation, as in I wish I was very rich, and in conditional clauses. We have a similar case with the present, which is sometimes used in a past-tense context, the so-called ‘historical present’. There is some consensus that a true historical present does not yet occur in OE (see the discussion in Mitchell, 1985: §§623– 30). It is, indeed, remarkable that instances of the historical present in Latin texts are consistently rendered by pasts in OE translations from Latin. In PDE, the historical present is frequently used in story-telling, to make a narrative more immediate and lively. This is then another case of a subjective use of a tense form: the event is presented as present because that is how it appears in the speaker’s experience of it. In a similar way we could explain occasional instances of the perfect in present-day British (25a) and Australian English (25b), occurring next to past tenses all referring to the same past event:

(25)a. ‘The lightning has struck the tree and shot down the trunk. One of the women had her back to the tree trunk, and the lightning has gone down her back, ripped open her shirt and come out through her feet,’ the officer said. (1999 The Guardian p. 4, 24 Sept.; reference from Denison, 2000b)

March 2000, reference from Engel & Ritz, 2000: 134)

The use of the perfect here makes the experience more vivid and more relevant. We find a similar mixture between past and ‘historical’ present in late ME texts when the historical present first seems to make headway:

(26)And to the tre she goth a ful good pas, | For love made hire so hardy in this cas, | And by the welle adoun she gan hyre dresse. | Allas, Than cometh a wilde lyonesse | Out of the wode, withoute more arest, | With blody mouth, of strangelynge of a best, | To drynken of the welle there as she sat. | And

whan that Tisbe hadde espyed that, | She rist hire up, with a ful drery herte, | And in a cave with dredful fot she sterte (Chaucer, LGW 802–11)

The present in (26), like the perfect in (25), makes the narrative more lively. However, the switch from past to present tense may also serve another function: Wolfson (1979) has argued that its function is to organise discourse into segments,