Microsoft Word Elmi Mecmue 28

Modal verbs in modern English
 
 
79
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 

---