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(57)Finite – infinitive – past participle – progressive participle – passive participle

These developments also show that an essential aspect of the grammaticalisation of the auxiliaries was their moving away from the original full verbs they developed from. We saw this with the modals in Section 3.3.4. The core modals lost their non-finite forms in the course of their development into auxiliaries. Likewise the full verb have still possesses a past participle had and a present participle having; perfect have, however, has neither, at least in finite clauses. It is the loss of such forms in the course of grammaticalisation, which, as it were, led automatically to the formal position that the auxiliaries acquire in the order given in (57), which can be described lexically as follows:

(58)modal – perfect have – progressive be – passive be – main verb

Warner (1993) shows that the obsolescence of certain constructions can be squared with this scenario of lexicalisation via grammaticalisation. Thus before is to had grammaticalised into a ‘true’ modal, having only a finite form like other modals, it could still occur in a position which is not available to modals according to the schemes in (57)–(58). The examples given in (45) above show this. In (45a) modal be to itself follows a modal, while in (45b) it still occurs in a non-finite form. As long as the progressive was not fully grammaticalised, the progressive auxiliary could still occur in all non-finite forms, just like the verb it derived from. Once it had got fitted into the order of (58), it became subject to its restrictions. Thus we still have a past participle of progressive be: he has been playing the piano, because the progressive slot occurs after the perfect slot. However, since neither the modal slot nor perfect have require a form being, this form was lost for progressive be.

3.4Clausal constituents

Throughout its history, English has had a stable system of grammatical functions in active clauses that contain an agent expression: the agent of the clause functions as the subject, the theme or affected entity functions as the direct object, and the recipient or experiencer as the indirect object, while other roles, such as instrument or source, have adjunct status. In (59) we give two present-day examples in which notional roles and grammatical functions are linked in this way. Sentences of this type have existed since the earliest records of the language (although there have of course been changes in case marking and word order; see Sections 3.2 and 3.5).

b. He had borrowed some books from the library with his friend’s library card

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The history of pro-drop in English, as in sentence (61), presents us with a somewhat similar picture. The usual account of the development holds that pro- drop was possible (but not very frequent) in OE, and disappeared well before the present time. An OE example of the phenomenon is given in (65):

In this case, the existence of PDE sentences like (61) forms glaring counterevidence to the idea that this option was lost from the language. Again, the development seems to have been from somewhat wider (but not very frequent) use in OE to very restricted use in PDE. A factor that seems to have played a role in OE is person features: first and second pronouns are omitted less often than third-person ones; the example in (65) is typical in this respect. Another context promoting pro-drop appears to have been a sequence of clauses with identical subjects; the example in (65) is actually also an instance of this, since it is preceded by the sentence Se halga ða het him bringan sæd ‘The saint then ordered seed to be brought to him.’

There are also cases in OE where the omitted subject is identical to a nonsubject in an earlier clause or where the omitted subject (or its overt referent) is inside a subordinate clause. The example in (66), where the empty subject is understood to refer back to the dative him in the preceding clause, instantiates both of these possibilities:

Pronoun omission of this type continues throughout the ME period and is still sometimes found in the sixteenth century, but then disappears from written texts.

A final context for pro-drop that we mention here is the use of a second-person singular verb in -(e)st, which sometimes – perhaps because of the distinctiveness of the verbal ending – lacks the subject pronoun thou (see Chapter 2 for the morphology of these forms). We saw above that pro-drop of a second-person pronoun is somewhat rare in OE; but it is not unusual in ME and it continues in early ModE, until the pronoun thou and the associated verbal form cease to be used altogether. A Shakespearian example is given in (67):

(67)Hast thou neuer an eie in thy heade? Canst Ø not heare?

(1 Henry IV II.i.26)

Overall, then, pro-drop in the history of English goes from infrequent use to even more infrequent use. Moreover, at each stage of the language it tends to