Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

The Old English copula weorðan
and its replacement in Middle English
Peter Petré
Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders & University of Leuven
Hubert Cuyckens
University of Leuven
With the aid of a specially compiled corpus, this paper accounts for the
replacement – mainly by become – of weorðan ‘become’, whose use rapidly
decreased in Middle English. Drawing on Goldbergian construction grammar,
the paper posits the existence of a lexeme-independent network of copular
constructions [Copula + np/ap/…]. Copular uses of weorðan are associated
with this network, but also form part of a second network exclusive to weorðan,
which, already in Old English, served as a model for the extension of becuman
to copular uses. In early Middle English, weorðan reacted to changes in the
lexeme-independent copular network. Weorðan was no longer used with
adjectival participles when these were constructionally separated from its most
frequent collocates, namely human propensity adjectives. Furthermore, reacting
to an influx of various adjectives in predicate position, becuman, which had no
collocational preferences, extended its use to these adjectives and eventually took
over from weorðan completely.
The focus of this paper is on the use of two verbs in copula-constructions. The first
of these verbs is obsolete in Present-day English (PDE); it still occurs as worth in
the nineteenth-century idiom woe worth thee. In Old English (OE), its infinitive
is usually spelt (ge)weorðan, and in Middle English (ME) (i)worthen. The second
verb is PDE become (OE becuman, ME bikomen), which, in early ME, is one of
the two main verbs that replaced weorðan in most of its contexts (the other verb
is PDE wax, OE weaxan, ME waxen). Because the emphasis in this paper is on the
OE period, we will from now on refer to these verbs in their OE forms of weorðan
and becuman. In addition, our main interest will be in the construction types
. In the present paper, the prefixless verb weorðan and the prefixed verb geweorðan are treated
as a single lexeme. While this is a simplification, the functions of these two verbs are sufficiently
similar to justify a global discussion of them.