The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Grammaticalization and grammar change 299(10) a. e Sægeatas selran næbban to geceosenne cyning ænignethe Sea-Geats better [ACC] not-have to choose king any [ACC]‘[that] the Sea-Geats would not have any better man to choose asking/whom they may choose as king’ (Beo 1845)b. Geswiga u earmingc, ne hæfst u nan ingc on me tobe-silent you wretchling not have you no thing against me todonnedo‘Be silent you wretch, there is nothing that you can do against me’(LS14(MargaretAss 15) 147)It is also not correct to suggest, as the above grammaticalization stages of vander Gaaf and Brinton do, that modal colouring becomes more prominent overtime, as the Appendix again clearly shows. Also, to-infinitives do not containexplicit tense, voice, modality or aspect (at least not in Old English). This hasto be inferred from context. Moreover, this is true for any to-infinitive, not justthe ones after habban: anyto-infinitive may carry implicit modality.Concerning the occurrence of intransitive infinitives, which are said toappear in stage (iii), the Middle English period, it can be said that all the earlyexamples can be explained differently, like the Old English ones discussed in(5). Brinton provides one from Chaucer:(11) I moot go thider as I haue to goI must go there where/that I have to go (Chaucer Pardoner 749)This could also be interpreted with as as a relative and functioning as theobject of go, meaning, ‘I must go there, (the way) that I have to go’. This quasitransitiveuse of go is found elsewhere, as in the following example from vander Gaaf (1931: 185):(12) Qua has to ga any way, gode es ai ga bi e light of day [sic] 5who has to go any way, good is they go by the light of day‘Whoever has any distance to travel, it would be good for him to go duringday light’(Cursor Mundi (F)14194)Here the verb go (in the first, relative clause) also has a quasi-object, and it isinteresting to observe that in spite of the word order (haveto-infinitiveNP), the sentence has no clear obligative meaning; rather, the modalityimplicit in the infinitive is of a general nature. Similarly, the early examples inVisser are not truly intransitive. In the following example from Layamon, forinstance, the object (a) has been left out in Visser (1963–73: § 1408); the completequote is:5Van der Gaaf mixes up two ms. versions in his example so that this particularconfiguration of clauses does not in fact occur in one ms. However, this confusiondoes not affect our argument here.