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

100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
951–1050
(n = 572)
1051–1150
(n = 252)
Old English weorðan and its replacement in Middle English 5
1151–1250
(n = 360)
Figure 4. Weorðan, distribution of constructions.
of weorðan in all its uses, and at the same pace, as is made clear by the largely
uniform distribution of the weorðan-constructions in Figure 4. If one of these
constructions had been isolated from the others, a possible scenario would have
been that weorðan was lost in this construction only. Consider in this respect the
development of the modals, which in OE still occurred with nps as fully transitive,
lexical verbs, but which, partially because of the widening gap in syntax and
semantics between transitive constructions and constructions involving infinitival
complements, shed off their use as transitive, lexical verbs + np during the ME
period (see, for instance, Plank 984).
. The development of becuman as a copula
1251–1350
(n = 77)
H Other constructions
G Passive Participle
F Perfect Participle
E Copula + NP
D Copula + AP
C Copula + PP
B With dative object
A Intransitive
In ME, the frequency of weorðan decreased, and a range of alternatives emerged:
arise in (A); become in (B)–(E) (become to nought, become rich, become a Christian);
grow in (D)–(E) (grow old); turn in (C)–(D) (turn into rain, turn pale); the now
obsolete wax in (A) and (D)–(E) (wax old, wax a man); fall and come in (D) (Biese
932 & Visser 963: 97–208). In those cases where weorðan was used as a marker of
the future (as for instance in (35) below), it is replaced by will/shall + inf (Wischer
2005). Where weorðan, as in (G), contributed a specific semantics in combination
with a passive participle (e.g., its connotation of sudden change of state) which was
different from that of beon and is, it is not immediately clear which constructions
existed to express these semantics in ME (Mustanoja 960: 592).