The main hypothesis of this article is that, as early as the Old English period, there exists a specific syntactic position for preterite-present verbs. From a syntactic point of view, a position for these verbs cannot have suddenly "appeared" in Middle English. Moreover, the preterite-present verbs seem to behave differently from the strong and weak verbs, and to belong to a specific class of verbs. We shall use Chomsky's Minimalist Program for our analysis.
In Old and Middle English, THURFAN is part of the preterite-present verb class. Theses verbs are considered to be the ancestors of Contemporary English modal verbs. THURFAN expresses need and necessity. We could then claim that it is the perfect verb to express modality and be part of the class of modal verbs. Yet, it will not be this morphological form we shall find today, but NEED. This latter form is very close to NIEDAN/NEODIAN and NEDEN in Old and Middle English. This article aims at showing why NEED has replaced THURFAN in Contemporary English whereas these two forms coexisted in OE and ME. Our hypothesis is that THURFAN/THURFEN ideed disappeared but their replacement NEED have the same syntactic and semantic characteristics as THURFAN, but also the lexical ones it already had in OE and ME.
The aim of this paper is to try and explain, on syntactic and semantic grounds, the grammaticalization of the semi-modal OUGHT (TO) in Old and Middle English, i.e. how this lexical item has become a grammatical one. We shall base ourselves on the analysis we undertook in our PhD thesis, that is preterite-present verbs have a specific syntactic position.
This article will explain the syntactic, semantic and morphological agreement relationship there exists between a noun phrase and the noun (or noun phrase) adjoined to it.
This paper represents the logical continuation of the analysis I presented in my PhD thesis, by going deeper into the analysis of operator little v's, on the one hand, and of vModal on the other hand, as well as the analysis of the process of grammaticalization.
This article will be a general but somehow accurate survey of my PhD thesis for the attention of linguists interested in syntax, diachrony topics, modality and grammaticalization of the English language.