Grammaticalization and deflexion in progress. The past participle in the Old English passive

ABSTRACT

This article deals with the Old English adjectival construction that consists of the copulative verb bēon ‘to be’ and the past participle. Grammaticalization is gauged as to the agreement between the subject noun phrase and the past participle and from the perspective of deflexion, which is considered the final stage of grammaticalization. The highest rates of agreement are found in Ælfrician texts and translations from Latin, while other texts like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle not only evince remarkably lower figures of agreement, but also show a decrease over time. The conclusion is reached that, although the grammaticalization of the past participle in passive constructions is not complete on the basis of deflexion, the process is well underway in Old English.

Acknowledgements

This research has been funded through the grant FFI2014–59110 (MINECO), which is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

¹ The term adjectival is used with a morphological sense, to account for the fact that the participle follows both the verbal declension and the adjectival inflection. See Sleeman (2014) on the distinction between adjectival and verbal participles based on the semantic features stative, resultative and eventive. The reader is also referred to Lehmann (2014: 46) on some present participles used substantively that are witnesses to an older nominal inflection: Gothic fijands ‘fiend’, frijōnds ‘friend’; Old English fīend ‘fiend’, frīend ‘friend’, etc.

² There is agreement on the competition with bēon ‘to be’ as a reason for the loss of weorðan ‘to become’, but see Petré (2010) on an alternative explanation based on the continuity of narratives and the demise of the V2 rule. With respect to this verb, Jones & MacLeod (2017: 27) underline that the lack of grammaticalization in the passive meant that the loss of this lexeme [] could occur without great disruption to the capacity of the language to denote passive situations.

³ An anonymous referee rightly points out that, considering that for each past participle there is a corresponding lexical verb, the connection between the participle and the category of verbs cannot be trivial. Two possibilities arise in this respect. Either the verbal participle has been coerced into an adjectival slot or there has been a categorial change from adjective to verb. The existence of nominal declensions of Indo-European, followed with minor differences by nouns as well as adjectives, points to a change of category adjective > verb that is clearly reflected by the progressive loss of the adjectival inflection of the participle. See Lehmann (2014: 46) on the nominal inflection of participles.

⁴ We would like to thank Susan Pintzuk for her assistance with the searches in the YCOE.

⁵ The tags in figures 2 to 5 stand for the following categories and features: syntactic categories: IP-MAT (inflectional phrase matrix), NP (noun phrase); lexical categories: N (noun), NR (proper name), ADJ (adjective), VB (verb), BE (the verb bēon ‘to be’), ADV (adverb), D (determiner), NUM (numeral), P (preposition), CONJ (conjunction); morphological case at word level: ^N (nominative), ^A (accusative), ^G (genitive), ^D (dative); morphological case at phrase level: -NOM (nominative), -ACC (accusative), -GEN (genitive), -DAT (dative); tense: P (present); mode: I (indicative), S (subjunctive); non-finite forms: N (past participle).

⁶ Text tiles are given in italics to distinguish them from text categories as in Ælfric’s Homilies vs. Homilies.

⁷ These figures refer to prose texts only: the poetry texts considered below have been excluded from this quantification.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [FFI2014-59110]