Comparative Studies in Early Germanic Languages: With a focus on verbal categories(138 Studies in Language Companion Series)

This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English, Old High German, and other Germanic languages. Starting from the observation that German and English show diverging paths in the development of verbal categories, even though they descended from a common ancestor language, the contributions present in-depth, empirically founded studies on the stages and directions of these changes combining historical comparative methods with grammaticalisation theory. This collection of papers provides the reader with an indispensable source of information on the early traces of distinct developments, thus laying the foundation for a broad-scale scenario of the grammaticalisation of verbal categories. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of language change, grammaticalisation, and diachronic sociolinguistics; it offers important new insights for typologists and for everybody interested in the make-up of verbal categories.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction (by Diewald, Gabriele); 2. *haitan in Gothic and Old English (by Cloutier, Robert); 3. Incipient Grammaticalisation: Sources of passive constructions in Old High German and Old English (by Mailhammer, Robert); 4. Passive auxiliaries in English and German: Decline versus grammaticalisation of bounded language use (by Petre, Peter); 5. Causative habban in Old English: Tracing the Development of a Budding Construction (by Kilpio, Matti); 6. Remembering ( ge)munan: The rise and decline of a potential modal (by Eitelmann, Matthias); 7. The emergence of modal meanings from haben with zu-infinitives in Old High German (by Jager, Anne); 8. Hearsay and lexical evidentials in Old Germanic languages, with focus on Old English (by Timofeeva, Olga); 9. Markers of Futurity in Old High German and Old English: A Comparative Corpus-Based Study (by Diewald, Gabriele); 10. The Verb to be in the West Saxon Gospels and the Lindisfarne Gospels (by Bolze, Christine); 11. Aspectual properties of the verbal prefix a- in Old English with reference to Gothic (by Broz, Vlatko); 12. Paer waes vs. thar was: Old English and Old High German existential constructions with adverbs of place (by Pfenninger, Simone E.); 13. On gain and loss of verbal categories in language contact: Old English vs. Old High German (by Vennemann, Theo); 14. Index

Review :
This valuable collection of articles provides a wealth of detailed and systematically presented empirical information on specific topics related to verb constructions in Old Germanic languages. In several cases, a more complete factual picture of important developments is provided than is found elsewhere in the literature. Studies and surveys of grammaticalising verbal categories in English and German are usefully brought together here, with much to be learned from the contrasted early histories of the two languages.