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

Old English weorðan and its replacement in Middle English 25
(H) Other constructions (e.g., the Copula + Genitive object construction)
(8) Þa heo þonon hwurfon þa wurdon þa twege cnihtæs al swa fægeres.gen
hiwæs.gen swa heoræ fæderæs wæron. (c 50. LS 5 [InventCrossNap]:280)
“When they moved from there then became the two youths also of a fair
appearance just as their fathers were.”
The different constructions are here illustrated with the verb weorðan, but as will
become clear below, most of them are also found for becuman at a particular time
in the history of this verb. Note also that, in OE, weorðan is not only found in
copula-constructions, but also in many other constructions (among them, those
exemplified in (A)–(B)).
While weorðan was highly frequent in OE, ranging among the five most
frequent OE verbs, its frequency rapidly decreased in ME, so that it had disappeared
almost entirely by the end of the fourteenth century. This development,
taking place during the transition from OE to ME, was far-reaching, as is made
clear by the following two observations:
a. Within a relatively short space of time, weorðan disappeared in all its uses.
b. Instead of a single successor, weorðan apparently got replaced by a set of verbs,
the most important of which is become. Importantly, not one single verb from
among this set will assume all former uses of weorðan.
To our knowledge, no satisfactory explanation for either of these observations has
so far been given. The main reason for this explanatory gap seems that most of
the literature on weorðan focusses on one of its functions in isolation, ignoring its
other functions. 2 In addition to this lack of a comprehensive account of the loss,
and replacement, of weorðan, very little attention has been paid to OE and ME
(semi-)copulas in general. Exemplary for this lack of interest is the total absence of
any literature on the development of become as a copula.
The present paper is a first attempt to fill these gaps. It is structured as follows.
A preliminary first section describes the corpus which was compiled for this specific
purpose. In a second section, it is shown how the different functions of weorðan
were, originally, interrelated in OE within a network of constructions, i.e., pairings
of senses of weorðan with syntactic structures in which it occurs. A third section
focusses on the emergence of the copula becuman, one of weorðan’s successors, and
its relationship with weorðan. More specifically, it is shown how the development of
the copularizing function of become can be seen as a process of analogical extension
2. For instance, Biese ( 932, 952) and Zieglschmidt ( 930) concentrate on weorðan as a
copula, whereas Frary ( 929) and Kilpiö ( 989) concentrate on weorðan as an auxiliary of the
passive.