The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

• appearance ofinanimate subjects (with the beginning ofa shift fromdeontic to epistemic meaning)• appearance ofintransitive infinitives• development of new word order ‘haveto-infinitiveNP’ but not yetfixed• have to begins to occur after modals, in non-finite form and in the perfectiv. Early Modern English →have as ‘operator’ (Brinton 1991: 39–41)• integration of have into modal paradigm; epistemic meaning fullydeveloped• syntactic rebracketing to ‘I [have [to write a paper]]’• word order completely fixed• contraction of have with toThe first stage looks similar to that of van der Gaaf and Visser, except thatBrinton looks more carefully at the type of object that can be ‘possessed’. Ifit is true that the object NP is normally concrete, it would be ‘high’ in the categorialhierarchy used in grammaticalization studies to ascertain the degreeof grammaticalization (cf. Heine et al. 1991a: 157), and it would indeed indicatethat OE habban fully functions as a lexical verb. Similarly the animacyof the subject is an indicator of degree of grammaticalization, as we have seenin the to be going to example in (2) (where the presence of an inanimatesubject in the fourth example indicates that be going to has lost its concretesense of ‘directed movement’, which requires an agentive (animate) subject).In Old English the subject is animate, high on the so-called ‘animacy hierarchy’defined by Hopper and Traugott (1993: 157):human animate inanimate abstractGrammaticalization and grammar change 297At stages (ii) and (iii) the nature of the object and subject begin to changeaccording to Brinton, going down the ‘category’ and ‘animacy’ hierarchyrespectively. Further formal evidence in stage (iii) is the appearance of intransitiveinfinitives, and in stage (iv) the contraction of have and to, and thedevelopment of epistemic meaning. Other evidence, not mentioned byBrinton, would be the appearance of ‘double have’, indicating that the firsthave must be an auxiliary (cf. ‘double’ go in example (2), I’m going to go there).It is evident from Brinton’s use of incremental terms (is developing, increase,etc.) that she still sees the development as essentially gradual, with the semanticchanges leading the way for the later syntactic ones. This is indeed a possiblescenario, on which the semantic changes themselves are gradual, and thesyntax is adapted to them. We believe, however, that the most important syntacticchange (the fixed word order that emerges and the change-over to auxiliarystatus) is not in itself an automatic consequence of the preceding semantic