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The Middle English chapter on the 'modal story'

Paper · 2005 · Maurizio Gotti

Summary

The paper addresses a long debate about how the English central modals (CAN, MAY, SHALL, WILL, MUST and their past forms) became auxiliaries. Lightfoot argued for an abrupt restructuring in the 16th century, with many changes happening at once. Maurizio Gotti argues instead for a gradual, interlinked process that began in Old English and unfolded mainly in Middle and Early Modern English. His evidence comes from the M3 section (1350–1420) of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, using the repertoire compiled by Gotti et al. (2002). He treats auxiliation as grammaticalisation along four lines: loss of verb-like morphology and syntax, periphrastic subjunctives, new tense markers, and the growth of epistemic readings. Corpus counts show that the verbs changed at different speeds. Some had already lost all main-verb uses by M3, while CAN and COULD still behaved as full verbs in over a quarter of their occurrences. Double modals and rare to-infinitives after modals are read as remnants of the older system. The study matters because it shows modality developing lexeme by lexeme along a continuum, not through one system-wide switch.

Key points

  • Data: the M3 subperiod (1350–1420) of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, with examples from texts such as BOETHCH (Chaucer's Boethius), CLOUD (The Cloud of Unknowing) and the Wycliffite texts.
  • Main-verb usage in M3 differs by lexeme:
    • CAN 27%, COULD 28%, WOULD 12%, WILL 10%;
    • SHOULD 0.4%, MAY 0.14%;
    • MIGHT, MUST and SHALL 0%.
  • Old verb-like uses lasted long after Middle English: modals with a direct object are attested for CAN until 1652, WOULD until 1685, and WILL as late as 1862.
  • Double modals were possible in Middle English (e.g. SHALL MAY, MAY CAN). In M3, SHALL + MAY was the commonest combination with 4 instances, followed by SHALL + CAN with 2. Gotti reads these as supporting Nagle's view that SHALL auxiliarised earlier than MAY and CAN.
  • The modals gradually took over the work of the subjunctive as its inflections merged with the indicative. Mustanoja estimates that by the late 15th century periphrastic forms outnumbered inflectional ones nine to one in non-dependent clauses.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Auxiliary status is measured per lexeme as the share of main-verb uses, not assigned to the whole class at once, which shows uneven progress inside one category.
  • I2. Double modals (SHALL + MAY, MAY CAN) were grammatical in earlier English and still survive in varieties such as Modern Scots, so stacked modals are not automatically errors.
  • I3. An ing-form after "shall be" may be adjectival or appositional rather than progressive, and the paper keeps both readings open with explicit paraphrases.
  • I4. Modal verbs took over the subjunctive's job of marking non-factual mood, so modality and irrealis belong to one functional space.
  • I5. The study judges a radical-versus-gradual claim by checking the dates of attested counterexamples, such as direct objects after modals centuries later.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): The parser should decide AUX vs VERB per token. "can"/"will" with a direct object (e.g. "will" meaning bequeath) should get VERB with obj, not a blanket AUX label.
  • I2 (tree): Treebank conversion and the parser could allow two aux dependents on one verb for dialectal or historical input, instead of forcing one modal into a root or xcomp.
  • I3 (frames): Frame building could keep both the progressive-event reading and the attribute reading for such strings, choosing only when context decides.
  • I4 (world): When a modal or subjunctive marks a clause, the world model could store the event as hypothetical, obligatory or possible rather than as an asserted fact.
  • I5 (learn): Evaluation could look for late or rare counterexamples to every induced repair rule, as a negative control against rules that assume one clean category boundary.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksClassics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Maurizio Gotti. 2005. The Middle English chapter on the 'modal story'. SELIM 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.13.2005.115-146

@inproceedings{gotti2005middle,
  title = {{The Middle English chapter on the 'modal story'}},
  author = {Maurizio Gotti},
  booktitle = {SELIM 13},
  year = {2005},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.13.2005.115-146},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.13.2005.115-146}
}

References

44 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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