Introduction

The first part of this book has established the essential grammatical and lexical characteristics of the modem auxiliaries. Armed with an understanding of the most recent point of their development, I want in the second part of the book to ask how the modem auxiliaries developed, and what kind of grammatical status they had in earlier English. Their Old English ancestors already appeared in constructions which can sometimes be translated using modem auxiliaries, so they had at least some ‘notional’ points of contact with their modem congeners, if arguably often a contextual one, but their grammar was clearly much closer to that of nonauxiliary verbs. Most strikingly, periphrastic do did not appear in Old English, so that as in present-day French and German it was finite verbs generally which appeared in inverted interrogatives and were involved in the placement of sentential negation. The ancestors of the modem modals were also not as sharply distinctive in morphology and subcategorization as today. One view of these differences is that ‘pre-modals’ (and presumably other ‘pre-auxiliaries’ too) were simply verbs in Old English (see Allen 1975, Lightfoot 1979, Roberts 1985). In Lightfoot (1979) this leads to an account of the emergence of modals as a sudden, cataclysmic development early in the Modem English period, and to an account of syntactic change in terms of sharp discontinuities. But this account leaves the nature of earlier developments obscure; it claims that the definitional properties of ‘premodals’ developed essentially by chance, in some quite mysterious way.