The present talk focuses on the replacement in the past tense of English weorðan ‘become’ by wesan ‘be’. I argue that a systematic aspectual distinction between them existed in Old English (OE), evidenced in the unique collocational strength between weorðan and certain time adverbials, as ap¬pears from an extensive corpus study. In Middle English (ME) these adverbials largely disappeared, and as a result, their collocate weorðan did too. This process, it is argued, is itself due to a broader develop¬ment of English into an unbounded language (Carroll & Lambert 2003; Trips & Fuß 2007).
The distinction between wesan and weorðan in the passive is much debated. While early philologists like Frary (1929) argued that wesan was used for expressing result¬ing states or pluperfects, and weorðan for actional (or eventive) passives, Mitchell (1985: 324) stresses that wesan too can be used in eventive passives, and that the two were basically in free variation, as in (1).
(1) (Annal 633) Her wearð Eadwine cing ofslagen, [...] (Annal 642) Her was Oswald ofslagen Norðhymbra cing. (c1107. ChronF: 633 & 642)
“Here [= in this year] king Edwin was/got slain, [...] Here Oswald, king of Northumbria was/?got slain.”
However, things are different in main clauses containing time adverbials. Significantly, weorðan frequently co-occurs with time adverbials meaning ‘then’ or ‘immediately’ (as in (2); 55% in late OE), whereas wesan does so only in 20% of its occurrences.
(2) Heo hine freclice bat. Ða wearð heo sona fram deofle gegripen. (c1025. GD 1 [C]: 4.31.1)
“She beat him heavily. Then she was/got suddenly taken by the devil.”
This difference clearly suggests that a basic aspectual distinction between wesan and weorðan did exist in the OE passive, and that it is basically the same as the one observed in their copular uses.
The systematic presence of time adverbials has further been linked to OE being a bounded lang-uage (Los 2008). A bounded language specifies ‘topic time’ (Klein 1994): the event is chopped up into consecutive temporal segments, linked by means of time adverbials – in (2) ‘then’ and ‘sud¬denly’. Their presence thus signals a change of state, which explains their association with weorðan.
The replacement of weorðan by wesan, then, is hypothesized to be a consequence of the transition of English from a bounded to an unbounded language during early ME, which caused the time adverbials to largely disappear (Kemenade & Los 2006). Experimentally triggered differences between German (bounded) and English (unbounded) descriptions (see (3), from Carroll, von Stutterheim and Nuese 2004) substantiate this idea, as only the bounded language has a time adverbial.
(3) a. Ein junger Mann surft auf hohen Wellen. Dann wird [!] er plötzlich von dem Brett geweht
b. A young man is surfing. The wind is blowing him off the board.
The transition thus caused the time adverbials, which reinforced the unique eventive meaning of weorðan, to largely disappear. This enabled the more frequent wesan to take over in the passive, and later on also in some copular uses, as in (4), where the differences between the OE and ME versions are in fact predicted by the hypothesis. The OE version adds the linker ða ‘then’, absent in the Latin, whereas the ME version renders facta est ‘is made’ by a simple was.
(4) (OE). & hælend […] cweþ dohter, […] geleafa þin þec halne dyde & warð ða hal þæt wif of þære hwile. (MtGl (Ru) 9: 22)
(ME). And Jhesus […] seide, Douytir, […] thi feith hath maad thee saaf. And the womman was hool fro that our. (a1425(c1395) WBible(2), Mt 9: 22)
“And Jesus [...] said: ‘Daughter, […] your faith has made you safe. And the woman was cured from that hour on.”
In general, my analysis insightfully links two hot topics in the literature on OE and ME, namely (i) the history of passive auxiliaries and copulas in general, and (ii) the function of time adverbials, by appealing to a theoretical distinction between bounded (OE) and unbounded (ME) systems.
References
Carroll, M. & Monique Lambert. 2003. Information Structure in narratives and the role of grammaticised knowledge: A study of adult French and German learners of English. Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition, edited by Christine Dimroth and Marianne Starren, 267-287. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Carroll, M., C. von Stutterheim & R. Nuese. 2004. The language and thought debate: A psycholinguistic approach. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Language Production, ed. by Thomas Pechmann and Christopher Habel. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 157.
Frary, Louise G. 1929. Studies in the Syntax of the OE Passive, with Special Reference to the Use of ‘Wesan’ and ‘Weorðan’. Language Dissertation No. 5 (Linguistic Society. of America).
Kemenade, Ans van & Bettelou Los. 2006. Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and Middle English. In: Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 224-248. Oxford: Blackwell.
Klein, W. 1994. Time in Language. London: Routledge.
Los, Bettelou. Syntax and Information Structure in Interaction: The Loss of Verb-Second in English and its Consequences. Paper presented at ISLE 1, Freiburg, 8 october.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax, vol. I: Concord, the Parts of Speech and the Sentence. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Trips, Carola & Eric Fuß. The syntax of temporal anaphora in early Germanic. Paper presented at CGSW Stuttgart, 9.6.2007.
Corpora used
Die Winteney-Version der Regula S. Benedicti Lateinische und Englisch mit Einleitung, Anmerkungen, Glossar und einem Facsimile zum erstenmale. 1888. St. Benedict, Arnold Schröer, ed. Halle: M. Niemeyer. (Electronic edition from the University of Michigan Library, url: http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AGV8488.0001.001 [06.07.2007]).
HC: Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic Part (ICAME, version 2). 1999. Matti Rissanen et al. Helsinki: Department of English.
The Paris psalter and the Meters of Boethius (The Anglo-Saxon poetic records, 5). 1961. George Ph. Krapp, ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
PPCME2: Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 2nd edition. Anthony Kroch. Pennsylvania: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/ [06.07.2007].
The Middle English Genesis and Exodus (Lund Studies in English, 36). Olof Arngart, ed. 1968. Lund: Gleerup.
YCOE: The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. 2003. Ann Taylor et al. York: Department of Language and Linguistic Science.
YPC: York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry. 2001. Susan Pintzuk and Leendert Plug. York: Linguistics Department.status: publishe
