Edited by Gabriele Diewald, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka and Ilse Wischer
This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English, Old High German, and other Germanic languages. Starting from the observation that German and English show diverging paths in the development of verbal categories, even though they… read more
The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues and raise a number of new questions that indicate the future direction of grammaticalization studies. The volume focuses on issues such as grammaticalization and lexicalization; the unidirectionality… read more
The Old English (OE) pre-modals willan and *sculan are generally considered less grammaticalized than their Modern English counterparts will and shall; nevertheless they most often function as auxiliary verbs (cf. Wischer, 2006: 173). Their present tense forms have already been studied in… read more
This paper is a comparative corpus-based study of constructions that had the potential of marking future events in Old High German (OHG) and Old English (OE), i.e. modal constructions and those with be/become-verbs. Given the fact that both languages stem from a common source and probably had… read more
This paper commences by characterizing the exceptionality of the Old English double paradigm of sL and bLforms of the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense among the (West) Germanic languages, followed by an analysis of the use of beon and wesan in the Old English section of the Helsinki Corpus with a… read more
