The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

304 The syntax of early Englishdepending on context, but all with the same syntactic substructure, i.e. withhave as a full verb governing an object NP, followed by a relative clause. In thisconstruction the verb have could range from fully lexical (as it usually was inthe A1 and A2 structures) to almost bleached, and the infinitive could havemodal implications (often obligative), again depending on context. This situationlasted for centuries with no visible change until the occurrence of thegrammatical reanalysis in the late Middle and early Modern periods. It is thereforedifficult to see any necessary relationship between the semantic and thesyntactic developments in this particular case of grammaticalization. This isfurther supported by the fact that sister languages like German and Dutch havenot witnessed the development of haben/hebben (the respective cognates ofhave) into an auxiliary, in spite of the fact that these verbs are used in bleachedmeanings, just like have. 8 Note that both German and Dutch are still SOV languages– in which have and the infinitive are not as a rule adjacent on thesurface. This may well be one of the reasons why the reanalysis that took placein English was not shared by these languages, and why they are still, as far asthis construction is concerned, at the stage that we have described for the OldEnglish and early Middle English periods.In our view of this case of grammaticalization, therefore, both semantic andsyntactic changes play a role, and they are partially independent, i.e. the syntacticchanges do not simply depend on the semantic ones, automatically followingthem; they are to a large extent influenced by the grammar acquired bythe learner at the moment of the change. It is also of some interest to observethat the construction with have and a to-infinitive indeed shows a tremendousincrease between Old English times and the early Modern period: from 17occurrences in Old English to 339 in early Modern English counting all categories(see Appendix; length of corpora used is 413,000 words for OE, 608,500for ME and 551,000 for eModE). Since frequency is considered to be animportant factor in grammaticalization theory (because it is considered to bea prerequisite for bleaching to take place, cf. Traugott and Heine 1991b: 9), itmust have considerably helped the development that took place. Another syntacticfact that may have aided the auxiliarization of have is the developmentthat took place in the existing group of modal auxiliaries. These so-called coremodals had been losing most of their non-finite forms (see Lightfoot 1979: 98ff.; Plank 1984). Thus, the development of new modals (next to have to, alsobe able to, be obliged to, etc.) must have come in handy to fill a number of paradigmaticgaps. It seems probable that such a chance factor supported theeventual development, but it is unlikely that it provided the trigger for the8For a discussion of how the verb hebben in combination with a te-infinitive is usedin contemporary Dutch, see Fischer 1994a: 16–17, note 24.