The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Grammaticalization and grammar change 295(5) a. tele a andfengas e him behefe synt, hwæer hecounts the takings which to-him necessary are whether hehæbbe hine to fullfremmennehas him to finish‘counts the money which he needs, (to see) whether he has (money) tofinish it [the tower]’ (Lk(WSCp) 14.28)b. Gif ge noldon Gode lybban on cildhade, ne on geogoe,if you would-not for-God live in childhood, nor in youth,gecyrra nu huruinga on ylde to lifes wege, nu geturn now at-least in old-age to of-life way now youhabba hwonlice to swincennehave but-little to work‘If you wouldn’t follow God’s example in childhood, nor in youth, turnat least in your old age to the way of life now that you have but littlework to do’ (ÆCHom II, 5.45.123)Mitchell (1985: 401–2) notes that in (5a) ‘the object andfengas is to be understoodfrom the previous clause’, while in (5b) hwonlice functions logically asthe object (cf. also Jespersen 1940: 205). Mitchell (1985: § 953) thereforefollows Bock (1931: 165) in concluding that all Old English cases of have followedby the to-infinitive are the same syntactically: the NP object is an argumentof have and is itself followed by an adnominal infinitive.Brinton (1991: 20–1), on the other hand, adheres more or less to the proposedgrammaticalization development, but tries to find support for it bylooking at other cases of grammaticalization and generalizations that can beextended from those. Thus, she considers parallel developments in Romancelanguages with the cognate or close equivalent of have, as described inBenveniste (1968), Fleischman (1982) and especially Pinkster (1987). She usesthese as support for a similar development in English, according to themethod advocated in Hopper (1991: 20): ‘The application of such cross-linguisticgeneralizations about grammaticization is a standard . . . technique toguide an investigation of grammaticization in a particular language.’ Thedanger of such a strategy is, as indicated in section 9.2, that grammaticalizationitself comes to be seen as a causal factor. We should look in the first placeat the synchronic facts at each relevant stage in the history of English to findout what caused the grammar changes that are reflected at each stage. This isindeed Brinton’s second point, namely that we need more linguistic detail tohelp decide to what stage a particular construction belongs. On the basis ofher investigation (using the Helsinki Corpus as her main data-base), Brintonrecognizes the four stages given in (6), the first three of which roughly correspondto the stages posited by van der Gaaf and Visser. The grammatical correlatesof the construction at each stage are listed. Brinton is also much more