Aspect

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even in the written documents for it to grammaticalise into an aspectual marker. Yet recent investigations into the presence of a Celtic substratum in English suggest that the modern progressive may be a direct development of the gerund rather than the result of a phonetic change involving the present participle. See Filppula et al. (2002b), Poppe (2002) and White (2002).

Next to the possible variation in form, it should also be noted that the function of the be + -ende form was different in OE. It is often found with verbs that typically wouldn’t occur in the progressive in PDE, i.e. verbs that are inherently durative, such as wunian ‘dwell’, libban ‘live’, growan ‘grow’, e.g. (27a), and when found with activity verbs, it is much more common in the past than in the present, with the sense of duration shading into one of habit or a characteristic, (27b) (for this more adjectival sense of the present participle, see also below). Strang (1970: 350–1) also notes a special sense occurring in the OE progressive with adverbials of time: in (27c) it is used for limited duration but with the connotation of persistence, of ‘not giving up’; see also Poppe (2002: 241) who notes that this meaning of the progressive is also present in Middle Irish and may therefore also be due to a Celtic substratum:

This function/meaning of the progressive remains more or less unchanged in the ME period, and it is only when its frequency rises considerably in the course of the eModE period that it begins to function as part of an aspectual system (indicating primarily ‘limited duration’), as it still does nowadays. Its use is at first still optional, and the construction becomes fully grammaticalised (i.e. obligatory in contexts describing limited duration) only in the late ModE period.

Other questions that need to be asked with respect to the progressive concern its formal development and the reason why it became an obligatory part of the verbal

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It is clear from these examples that the dividing line between adjective/noun and verbal element is very thin. Contrast, for instance, the (a)–(b) and the (d)–(e) examples: in (28a,d) the present participle is hardly verbal, because it is used together with the essentially adjectival prefix un- (in (28a)) or governs a genitive (his in (28d)) rather than an accusative (cf. hit in (28e)). In all these cases we have the verb be appearing either as a copula or an existential verb together with the present participle. In OE, these two elements were often separated by other constituents, but in ME they increasingly occurred next to one another (see Section 3.5 for full discussion of the relevant changes in word order). The resulting adjacency of be and the participle is another step towards further grammaticalisation, because it is easier with juxtaposed elements for the construction to be interpreted as a unit. Once it was a unit, it could become part of the verbal system. As far as semantic content is concerned, it is clear that the sense of be + -ende was not necessarily one of limited duration. However, when the participle in ME became more verbal – the reasons for which we noted above – the adjectives and nouns in -ende lost ground (as indeed they already had with the general loss of native affixes after the OE period), and the construction lost the connotation of unlimited duration it had had in such cases in OE.

The development of the progressive into a future marker, as in We are leaving at six, is a later one (though cf. Visser, 1963–73: §1830). It becomes common only in the eModE period but is first restricted to verbs of motion (cf. the rise of the to be going to construction, mentioned in Section 3.3.4). Later, other activity

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Typical OE perfects have the following features: the past participle may still be declined like an adjective (e.g. gehæledne in (30a)), the object of the verb may precede the past participle (as in (30b)), and the auxiliary may be be rather than have, (30d). Now inflections are already being lost in the OE period, the object– verb order lingers on until the early ModE period and is still the norm in dialects such as Irish English, while the be forms are found with mutative verbs till late in the nineteenth century, with some relics left even in PDE. The general decline of this kind of variation leads to a gradual increase in the grammaticalisation of the perfect and to clearer functions for both preterite and perfect.

The semantic shift has two sides. First of all, the verb have loses its weak possessive meaning, and begins to occur with non-animate subjects and with intransitive verbs (this stage has already been reached in OE, witness (30a,c)), that is, it collocates with sentence elements that cannot be arguments or complements of a verb referring to possession. Secondly, whereas perfect have had at first only present time reference expressing completion (in OE), it gradually became part of the tense system, referring to an activity that started in the past and was linked to the present moment. From the ME period onwards, the perfect started to compete with the preterite. At first the distribution between the two forms is uneven and also still undefined, the preterite still dominating in contexts where we would now use the perfect, and vice versa.

It is interesting to compare the grammaticalisation of the perfect in English with the same process in other Germanic languages. In all languages of the Germanic branch the initial development is the same: the occurrence of a form of be/have and a past participle, and its use both temporally and aspectually. With the narrowing of its function, the paths begin to diverge, however. In English, and in Swedish, be disappears and the structure itself develops more and more into an aspectual marker. In Dutch and German, on the other hand, both be and have remain, and the structure becomes part of the tense system. In some German dialects (e.g. Swiss German) the perfect has even replaced the preterite completely as a tense marker. It is interesting to note that in PDE (especially in American English), the perfect now seems to be regressing, i.e. losing ground to the preterite. Elsness (1997: 359) attributes this development to two factors:

(i) in informal, spoken English the present perfect auxiliary have usually appears in a highly reduced form; and (ii) with the vast majority of verbs in Modern English, including all regular verbs, the form of the past participle is identical with that of the preterite, in both speech and writing.

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Whether the decreasing frequency of the perfect is due to this lack of distinctness is a matter that needs further investigation (one wonders why, if this is a factor, it is the perfect that decreases, and not the preterite). It could also be the case that the stronger presence of an aspect system in English (as compared to e.g. German and Dutch, which do not have a grammaticalised progressive or durative construction) has led to this development. Elsness notes on the same page:

More and more, the present perfect seems to be developing into a verb form used above all in references to situations which not only are located within a period which extends up to the deictic zero-point, but which themselves extend up to that point [emphasis added].

In other words, the link with a definite past that existed in the ME and ModE periods has become further reduced in PDE.

Before we leave the perfect, two smaller points need to be addressed. First of all, why did the periphrastic perfect develop at all? We think that its origin in OE can be linked, yet again, with affixal losses, in particular with the loss of the prefix ge-, which indicated perfectivity in OE. Ge- was used both as a near-compulsory inflectional element in the past participle of verbs (reduced to y- in southern ME and to zero in the north) and as a derivational prefix in verbs to distinguish (lexically) perfective from durative verbs (this use did not survive the OE period; for examples, see (30) above). However, it should also be stressed that the development of a perfect from a possessive verb like have is quite a natural grammaticalisation path, occurring independently in many other languages.

The other point concerns the loss of the be auxiliary in the perfect. In OE the rule was for intransitive verbs (especially mutatives) to form the perfect with be, and for transitive verbs to be collocated with have (this goes back to the original meanings of have and be as possessive and existential verbs respectively; see above). In ME, have gradually extends its domain within the perfect structure, for which McWhorter (2002: 236–8, 258) sees Scandinavian influence, pointing to the fact that Old Norse, Modern Icelandic and Swedish use a cognate of have with both transitive and intransitive verbs, and use be as a resultative with only a very small number of intransitive verbs. We certainly witness a strengthening in the ‘division of tasks’ between the two auxiliaries: have comes to be associated more and more with activity and be with state. Thus we see that the be perfect collocates especially with adverbs of time or place (indicating result or state; see (31a)), while the have perfect is preferred with adverbs of manner or degree, which highlight the activity of the verb, irrespective of whether the verb is transitive or intransitive, (31b):

(31)a. Be wel avysed on that ilke nyght | That we ben entred into shippes bord, | That noon of us ne speke nat a word (Chaucer, MillT 3584–6)

b.For ye han entred into myn hous by violence (Chaucer, Melibee 1812)

Due to the loss of the subjunctive (see Section 3.3.3), the verb have also comes to be used more and more often in hypothetical contexts, in contrast to be,