152 O L G A F I S C H E R A N D W I M VA N D E R W U R F F
(47)a. Could you might possibly use a teller machine?
b.They might not could have gone over the state line to get her.
c.Could be he may didn’t want to come.
All three sentences could be viewed as featuring a regular auxiliary together with a modal-derived adverb (might, could and may in (47), respectively), for which perhaps the term ‘post-modal’ might be appropriate. The distribution of sentences like (47) fits in well with this analysis of double modals: they have been found to be frequent especially in face-to-face conversation, where they typically have a hedging, politely suggestive and non-intrusive sense. It is not surprising to see that in these contexts, politeness is reinforced by the use of an extra hedging marker in the form of a post-modal. Whatever the precise nature of the construction (and its possible further spread, or loss, in the years to come), it is certainly interesting to see that well-known historical changes in the syntax of English, such as the largescale developments that have affected the modals, do not simply stop once the stage of Modern English has been reached; on the contrary, they continue to play themselves out and thereby make themselves available for much more detailed investigation than we can ever hope to achieve for aspects of the change completed at earlier periods.
3.3.5 |
Voice |
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From earliest times English has made use of a periphrastic construction to express the passive, the original (medio-)passive inflectional endings of Germanic having been lost at a prehistoric stage. The only remnant of this old system in OE is seen in the verb hatan. The meaning of this verb in OE was ‘to call’ (next to some other meanings such as ‘promise’, ‘command’), and mediopassive forms such as sg hatte/pl hatton, ‘(s)he was called/they were called’, were in use till the beginning of the ME period. Due to its exceptional position within the system of voice, these forms were eventually lost, aided no doubt by the availability of the Old Norse loanword kalla ‘to call’, which, used in the periphrastic passive, replaced it. In German and Dutch, the medio-passive form remained but acquired a new, active-looking infinitive – heissen/heten ‘to be called’ – which, as it were, lexicalised the passive meaning. Such a development also took place in ME when a new verb highten ‘to be called’ developed, but this was short-lived.
The OE periphrastic passive was formed with weorþan and beon/wesan. It is tempting to assume that weorþan functioned like its Modern German and Dutch counterparts werden and worden in denoting process rather than state, but there is no firm or conclusive evidence to be found in the OE documents. Presumably weorþan, used elsewhere in OE in the sense of ‘become’ rather than ‘be’, may have indicated process rather than result at first, but in many OE writers no difference is made in the passive construction between weorþan on the one hand and beon/wesan on the other. It is possible to read ‘process’ into the weorþan instances in (48) and ‘resultant state’ into the wæs-construction, but it is difficult to be certain:
Syntax 153
(48)
On þæm feorþan geare his rices he gefeaht wiþ Gotan, & gefliemed In the fourth year of-his kingdom he fought with Goths, and put-to-flight
wearð, |
& |
bedrifen |
on |
anne tun, |
& |
þær |
wearð |
on |
anum huse |
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was |
and |
pursued |
into |
a |
town |
and there |
was |
in |
a |
house |
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forbærned. |
þær |
wæs |
swiþe ryht dom |
geendad |
þæt |
hie þone |
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burned-to-death. There was |
very |
just |
sentence ended |
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that they that-one |
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woroldlice |
forbærndon |
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þe |
hie |
þohte |
bærnan |
on |
ecnesse. |
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worldly |
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burned-to-death |
who |
them |
thought |
burn |
in |
eternity |
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‘In the fourth year of his reign, he fought against the Goths, and was put to flight and got trapped in a village, and there was burned to death in a house. A very just sentence was carried out there in that they burned to death the person who intended letting them burn in eternity.’ (Or 6 34.153.14; Traugott, 1992: 199)
Presumably, because the difference in meaning between weorþan and beon/wesan became indistinct in OE, a tendency arose to use only the beon/wesan form, which was the most frequent form; by the late ME period weorþan was no longer used.
The changes taking place in the periphrastic passive are typical of a grammaticalisation process. At first we see the use of full or, in this case, copula verbs like beon or weorþan combined with a past participle that is used adjectivally. At this stage the verbs in question still must have had their own, lexical meanings (i.e. expressing ‘state’ and ‘process’ respectively). Evidence that the past participles were adjectival can be found in the fact that in OE there are traces of declined past participles. In the Orosius (the text used in (48)), we still find both, but apparently without any difference in meaning: compare ii æþelingas wurdon afliemed of Sciþþium (Or Head 1.10) with wurdon twegen æþelingas afliemde of Sciþþian (Or 1 10.29.14), ‘two princes got/were banished from Scythia’. The past participles and the copula verbs next come to be looked upon as part of a new passive construction through their increasingly frequent use and the almost complete absence of an inflectional passive. Consequently both elements lose their independent status as adjectives (through loss of adjectival trappings) and verbs (meanings becoming bleached), respectively. While the initial ‘exploratory’ periphrastic passives still show many variants, it is usual at the end of the grammaticalisation chain for just one variant to survive; in this case that is the verb be. The choice of be as the passive auxiliary, and the loss of weorþan, must have led to the exploration of new ways to express the difference between process and result. The first instances of a new process passive with get are encountered in the seventeenth century and have become very popular since then. Other process verbs used are fall and become, and new resultative verbs are remain, stay.
Alongside changes taking place in the verbal part of the passive construction, there are a number of very interesting developments in the types of construction in which passives could occur. In OE only the direct object of a transitive verb could fill the subject position in a passive construction. In ME this position could also be filled by indirect and prepositional objects. This development will be
154 O L G A F I S C H E R A N D W I M VA N D E R W U R F F
discussed in Sections 3.4.4 and 3.5.6. Secondly, in OE there was a very limited use of passive infinitives, which are only found after modal verbs. In all other constructions where we now use a passive infinitive, an active form of the infinitive was used instead (often called the ‘passival infinitive’). This development is further discussed in Section 3.4.5.
3.3.6 |
Rise of do |
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A major feature of English is the obligatory use of do in negative and interrogative sentences when there is no other auxiliary present. In these cases do is used as an empty ‘operator’, that is, it is a purely grammatical element without any referential meaning. Operator do is the end result of a grammaticalisation process that started in the ME period. As is usual in such a situation, grammaticalised do developed out of full-verb do. In what follows, we will look at what full-verb uses of do may have been the source of the operator and, secondly, we will sketch what the causes may have been that led to the rather idiosyncratic grammaticalisation of do in English. For the possibility that the rise of do was connected with the presence of a Celtic substratum, see Klemola (2002).
There are a number of candidates for the origin of operator do. Full verb uses of do usually cited are causative do, anticipative do and substitute do. All three uses already occurred in the OE period, and are indeed common usages in all other West Germanic languages:
(49) |
. . . and |
deþ |
hi |
sittan, |
and he gæþ sylf |
and hym þenað. |
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. . . and does |
them |
sit, |
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and he goes |
self |
and |
them serves |
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‘. . . and makes them sit down, and goes himself and serves them’ |
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(ÆHom 26.1 8) |
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(50) |
. . . ac |
utan |
don |
swa |
us |
þearf |
is, |
gelæstan hit georne. |
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. . . but let-us |
do |
as |
us |
need |
is, |
perform |
it |
carefully |
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‘. . . but let us do as we should, i.e. carry it out with care’ |
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(WHom 8c 125) |
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(51) |
and |
hit |
þær |
forbærnð |
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þæt |
mancyn, |
swa |
hit |
her |
ær |
dyde. |
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and |
it |
there |
burns-to-death |
that |
people, |
as |
it |
here |
before |
did |
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‘and it will burn those people to death, as it has done here before’ |
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(HomU 35.1 (Nap 43) 9) |
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Note that as candidates for the origin of empty do, (49)–(51) each have their advantages and drawbacks. Causative do, (49), shows the required syntactic pattern in that it is immediately followed by an infinitive, but with the notion of ‘causation’ this do seems less than ideal, because the loss or bleaching of causation should result in a different sense in the context. It should also be noted that the more usual causatives in this construction in OE were biddan and lætan, and that do only becomes frequent here in ME. The meaning change is less of an obstacle, however, when we consider that causation is often implicit in transitive verbs, i.e. many verbs (e.g. break, build) can be both causative and non-causative, depending on context. Thus a causative do combined with such verbs could be
Syntax 155
‘equivocal’, i.e. do could be read as either a causative or an empty verb. Many such cases are found in ME, where causative do with an infinitive was itself also more frequent:
(52) |
A |
noble |
churche |
heo |
dude |
a-rere |
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a |
noble |
church |
she |
did |
raise |
‘She built a noble church / she had a noble church built’ (Sleg. (Ld) 4.118; Fischer, 1992: 271)
Here the context makes clear that the subject was not likely to do the building herself, and we see that in PDE too both a straight transitive verb and a causative construction can be used. Such a situation enables the ME language user to read do as empty of meaning.
The anticipative and substitute uses of do in (50) and (51), respectively, are perhaps better candidates from a semantic point of view because here do is practically empty of content already. They function as a kind of prop to the main verb, so that in the context they take on the meaning of the main verb. Syntactically, however, they are less appropriate because with anticipative do the infinitive does not immediately follow, while with substitute do, the matrix verb precedes and is not even infinitival.
We are still somewhat in the dark as to what constructions provided the origin or what factors were most crucial to the development. It should be stressed that general verbs like do are a frequent source for grammaticalisation developments in any language: do, in other words, is always around to be used when necessary. It has been noticed, for instance, that in many languages causative do comes to express perfective aspect because it is natural, when something needs to be done, that one concentrates on the resultant state. Denison (1985) indeed suggests that ‘perfective’ do may have been an intermediate stage between causative do and operator do. Another factor that may have aided the rise of empty do in ME is the large influx of French loanwords. Such new verbs can be difficult to fit into the native inflectional system, and a way of avoiding a hybrid form (a French word with an English past tense in -ed or a present in -est or -es/-eth) would be to use a form of the all-purpose verb do plus an infinitive (a strategy for incorporating loan verbs that is in fact found in several other languages). Once do has become more common, it may also begin to be used more frequently with other infinitives, possibly for phonotactic reasons (e.g. when a cluster of consonants – thou imaginedst – can be avoided this way), for reasons of rhyme and meter, for emphasis, for clarity (to disambiguate verbs like set, put which have the same form in present and past), etc. All these factors have been mentioned and investigated in the vast amount of literature on do, and no doubt they all played some role.
Whatever caused the initial spread of do in late ME, it is clear that after this initial period we see a very steep rise of empty do in the second half of the sixteenth century in all types of clause: affirmative, interrogative and negative. This very sudden increase, and the later quite rapid decline of do in affirmative clauses in the seventeenth century, cannot quite be explained by the simple continuation of
156 O L G A F I S C H E R A N D W I M VA N D E R W U R F F
the factors mentioned above. Most linguists believe that there must have been other macro-causes for this rather special development. Three major factors have been mentioned: (i) the rise of periphrastic constructions elsewhere (in the tense, aspect, mood and voice systems); (ii) the increasing fixity of word order as SVO; and (iii) changes in the position of the adverbial.
Concerning the first, it seems likely that this may have influenced the initial increase but it cannot really be held responsible for the sudden decrease in affirmative do in the seventeenth century. It is possible that other periphrastic constructions (such as the progressive) became available in affirmative clauses to take over some of the uses affirmative do had been put to, but more likely it was combination with the other two factors that triggered the demise of affirmative do.
The fixation of word order has to do with the loss of the so-called verb-second rule; more will be said about that in Section 3.5. What is crucial for us here is that in OE the verb could appear in different positions in the clause. By the late ME period, however, it had become the rule for the lexical verb to immediately precede the object, i.e. the language was firmly VO, and for the subject to be positioned before the verb, i.e. the language was SV. In questions without an auxiliary, however, the direct adjacency of lexical verb and object and the order subject–verb would be disturbed. Thus compare declarative (53) with interrogative (54):
(53)He knew the danger (subject–verb–object)
(54)Knew he the danger? (verb–subject–object)
Inversion of S and V in sentences like (54) was a grammatical marker with a semantic function, i.e. it made a clause interrogative. Of course, intonation by itself could do the job (as it does in many languages and to some extent in English too), but the availability of do made it possible to have a finite verb in initial position, indicating the interrogative nature of the clause, while at the same time keeping the main verb fixed between S and O, in accordance with the VO nature of the language.
(55)Did he know the danger? (subject–verb–object)
Evidence supporting this idea is the fact that do was first more frequent in yes/no questions (this may have been further assisted by the fact that only yes/no questions use verbal tags containing do), and only later became more current in other types of question which possessed an additional interrogative marker such as a wh-element. Thus in the early stages we would have the use of do in sentences like (55), where do ‘helps’ to keep both S and O close to the matrix verb, whereas do was less necessary in sentences like What said he and When came he, where there was an interrogative marker in the form of the wh-element and where, in addition, there was no object that had to be positioned next to the verb, due to wh-movement and an intransitive matrix verb, respectively.
For very similar reasons, inversion of S and V after adverbials and other initial elements (in sentences like Then went these people to the town) was lost around
Syntax 157
this time too. Here, too, do could have been selected in order to keep the inverted order (as it indeed did after negative elements like only), but very little was lost here semantically – in contrast to the interrogatives – and so the more usual solution was to give up the inversion. This was moreover helped by the fact that personal pronouns already appeared here in the position before the finite verb (i.e. the usual order was Then they went to the town), due to their clitic nature (see further Sections 3.5.2 and 3.5.3). Now that all subjects were no longer inverted, the cliticisation of pronouns was abandoned too.
Fixed word order, in other words, played an influential role in generalising already available do in questions. Denison (1993: 467) suggests that the increase of semi-lexicalised units, such as take place, pay heed to, call out, etc., may also have been influential in the increase of do, because again do would serve here to keep the idiom together in questions and negatives.
The spread of do in negatives is slightly more complicated. Besides fixed word order, a role is played by the general tendency for the negative element (ne in OE and later) to occur before the finite verb. Not, in the form of naht, noht, nawiht etc., first came to be used in OE as a reinforcer placed after the verb, creating a multiple negative as in Ne derode Iobe naht þæs deofles costnung ‘not harmed Job not the devil’s temptation’ (ÆCHom II, 262.61). Gradually the use of a second negative increased, so that in ME two negatives became the rule. This paved the way for the loss of ne. Not then took over as a single negative, but still at first in its old position – thus no longer in the preferred position. It is not surprising, therefore, that we begin to see some variation in the placement of not, both in its ‘old’ postverbal position (cf. cowde not, dredeþ not in (56a,c)), and before the verb (not herd, not repente in (56a,b)):
(56) a. I seyd I cowde not tellyn that I not herd
(Paston Letters 705.51–2; Ukaji, 1992: 454) b. I not repente me of my late disguise
(Jonson, Volpone II.iv.27; Ukaji, 1992: 454) c. þise maner of pepull dredeþ not God ne noon seynte in heven (ME Sermons 69.13–14; Jack, 1978: 66)
Both constructions were found unsatisfactory: postverbal not was not in the natural position for the negative with respect to the verb and separated the verb from its complement in clauses without an auxiliary, as in (56c), while preverbal not separated the main verb from the subject. Elleg˚ard (1953: 194ff.) also notes that there was a general tendency in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for ‘light adverbs’ to move to preverbal position. This caused not, after the loss of ne, ‘to stand out as an exception’. (56a) also shows that the position of not after an auxiliary (cowde) was better placed for ultimate success because the intimate connection between the negative and the main verb (tellyn) was not disturbed, while the subject was still next to the verbal part that carried the INFL (tense, number) characteristics. As Denison (1993: 467) writes, the order Aux not Verb was also probably the most frequently occurring pattern (cf. factor (i) above