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

42 Peter Petré & Hubert Cuyckens
function realized by becuman in late Old and early Middle English. The questions
to be tackled in this section, then, are: why did becuman (and weaxan and several
other verbs) extend to the network of copula-constructions in the first place, and
why did weorðan disappear from this network (and, as a consequence, disappear
altogether)? Ideally, an answer to these questions should also explain the distributional
differences between weorðan and the newly emerging copulas.
In general, the answer lies with two kinds of changes in the general network
of copula-constructions. Before going into these changes into somewhat
greater detail, it is useful to briefly summarize them. The first change involves
the emancipation (Bybee 2003: 54) of a ‘true’ passive construction out of construction
(G), which was originally a construction in which a copula combined
with an adjectival participle based on a transitive verb and predicating a result
[[np.Subj Cop pple.SubjComp]/[-Ag.; -Vol; +Result]]. The result of this emancipation
is that the link (represented by the solid line in Figure 2) from the
topmost schematic copula-construction (i.e., [[np.Subj Cop xp.SubjComp]/
[-Agentive; -Volitional]]) to this construction is lost. However, the constructional
network of weorðan resisted this split-off, and, as a consequence, weorðan must
have sounded increasingly archaic. By the same token, this split also prevented
becuman from spreading to the emancipated passive construction. The second
change in the constructional network consists in its accommodating the requirements
of newly appearing time-stable predicates (certain kinds of APs as well as
NPs) in combination with copulas of change. While there is no principled reason
why weorðan would not meet these requirements, its high degree of entrenchment
in collocational patterns involving time-unstable predicate types prevented it from
spreading to the new, time-stable ones. By contrast, becuman, being a new copula,
had no such (conservative) collocational profile, and was thus perfectly suited to
fill this need, as will further be illustrated below. The emergence of new kinds of
predicates, therefore, also helps explain the success of becuman.
The first of these changes, the development of a passive construction, was
made possible by the disappearance – caused by phonetic erosion – of adjectival
endings on participles and the concomitant loss of agreement marking between
subject and subject complement. This, in turn, gave rise to a new syntactic pattern
(Mustanoja 960: 440): through structural reanalysis, the [Cop + Adjectival
Participle] construction (G) developed into a periphrastic verbal construction of
the passive [Subj Aux V], in which the former copula became an auxiliary containing
largely grammatical information (tense, number, aspect) and in which the
verbalized participle carried all the lexical content (Langacker 99 : 27– 47 &
Denison 993). Moreover, this new passive construction also developed a new
function (see Seoane 2006), whereby the subject of the passive was conceived as
the patient of a transitive event rather than as the non-agent of an instance