Modal verbs in modern English
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premodal was not base-generated in V, we extend this account to all premodals. So
we treat the ME [and OE] premodals as a class as main verbs with sentential
complements (…) (Roberts.
Anthony Warner finally concluded that:
In OE, all [the preterite-presents] shared major properties with the rest of the class
of verbs, and where clearly to be indentified as members of this class.
(...) the ancestors of to day’s modals and other auxiliaries share a range of
properties with verbs throughout Old and Middle English. And though some of these
properties (like the possession of a distinct subjunctive inflection) weaken, other
developing. This, there is evidence that these words continue to be rather closely
related to verbs even in late ME.
Following the quotations that have just been made, one has to remember that the
preterite-present verbs have always been
considered as verbs so far, the same way we
consider strong and weak verbs.
But before going any further, let us give the definition of the term preterite-
presents as found in Mossé.
One calls preterite-present verbs a certain number of verbs having the
morphological form of an Indo-European perfect but the semantic value of a present
form.
He further added:
One knows that the Indo-European perfect often expressed a state resulting from
the completion of the “perfectiveness” of an action, that is a present state: “I have
seen”, i.e. “I know” , “I have in mind” , i.e. “I remember”. This is true of the Germanic
preterite-present verbs.
Still within the verbal system, the present-meaning perfects
were isolated. They have been built up a more or less complete conjugation with a
weak preterite form, without a pre-ending vowel, but with a strong past participle.
Preterite-present verbs thus display both the features of strong verbs ( lack of
suffix and apophony) and of weak verbs (addition of a dental suffix in the past). To
this class of verbs should be added the anomal verb WILLAN. An anomal verbs is an
athematic verb ending in *-
mi, meaning the ending is directly added to the root
without the addition of a thematic vowel. In the Indo-European language (and leater
on in Germanic), the endings for the first person singular
in the indicative present
were *-
mi, as in Gothic, we have
i-m and in Old English we have
bio-m ‘I am’.
The (morphological) structure of these verbs is thus: root + endings (case,
number, gender, person), wheareas thematic verbs display the following structure:
root + thematic vowel + endings.
We shall adopt a different approach sine we are considering these verbs as modal
verbs as early as the Old English period.
To analyze the syntactic evolution of modal verbs, we put forward there main
hypothese:
1. As early as the Old English period, a syntactic position for preterite - present
verbs exists which is different from the one for strong and weak verbs.
Yeganə Qaraşova
80
2. Epistemic modals exist in Old English; then we assume
two syntactic positions
for modals: one for root modals and one for epistemic modals.
3. As early as Old English, epistemic and root modals are raisin verbs.
Introduces the reader to syntax of Old English as known in the literature, and to
the preterite-present verbs. This chapter then moves on to the approach we are
assuming concerning modal verbs: we highlight what their semantic, morphological,
phonological and syntactic characteristics are, as opposed to other types of verbs.
Middle English and follows the same pattern as the first one: we deal with the
syntax of preterite - present verbs, still in opposition
to other types of verbs, but we
mainly focus on the grammatical of these verbs (in parallel with the TO particle or
with the loss of subjunctive endings).
Now we shall analyze the verbs in Middle English. There are many verbs in
English during the period known as Middle English. This essay exhumes two
particular kinds of these verbs, called modal verbs to distinguish them from non-
modal or other verbs. Non-modal verbs main or laxative verbs, and are infected at the
end.
Modal verbs, on the hand, although they are laxative to begin within the end they
are modal verbs.
The last chapter, about Early Modern English, goes deeper into the analysis
usually done about modal verbs and sheds new light on a Distributed Morphology
viewpoint.
In the appendices, the reader shall find additional information about OE and ME
morphological forms of
the preterite - present verbs, but also the analysis of a specific
modal: AGAN ( =OUGHT TO)).
The present-day English category of modals sits only uncomfortably into Old
English. This is perhaps particularly true in terms of morphology. Historically
speaking, the verbs which we call ‘modals’ almost all belonged to a group which is
called preterite-present verbs. Such verbs originally had a preterite or past tense
morphology but this morphology had acquired a present tense meaning. If we take a
typical such verb,
cunnan ‘can, know’, then it is possible to observe that it has many
of the features which would be normally associated with a class III verb such as
singan. In particular it can be
observed that form such as cann ‘I know’ and
cunnon
‘we know’ relate in form to the past tense form
sang and
sungon respectively. Even
in present-day English we find
he can and this lacks the final inflectional
-s which we
expect to find with every 3
rd
person singular verb; the lack of final
-s something that
to day we still associate only with strong verb past tense forms, as in
sang ‘he sang’.
Because these preterite-present verbs had forms which were preterite in form but
present in meaning, they had to find new past tense forms from somewhere. The
solution to this was to form a new past tense using the dental
suffix associated with
the weak verbs, although in a somewhat altered, and not always well understood,
formation.
One obvious result of all this is that the preterite-present forms look rather
irregular, both in their (new) present and past tense morphologies, and cannot easily