TY  - INPR
A1  - McFadden, Thomas
A1  - Alexiadou, Artemis
T1  - Perfects, resultatives and auxiliaries in early English
N2  - In this paper, we will argue for a novel analysis of the auxiliary alternation in Early English, its development and subsequent loss which has broader consequences for the way that auxiliary selection is looked at cross-linguistically. We will present evidence that the choice of auxiliaries accompanying past participles in Early English differed in several significant respects from that in the familiar modern European languages. Specifically, while the construction with have became a full-fledged perfect by some time in the ME period, that with be was actually a stative resultative, which it remained until it was lost. We will show that this accounts for some otherwise surprising restrictions on the distribution of BE in Early English and allows a better understanding of the spread of HAVE through late ME and EModE. Perhaps more importantly, the Early English facts also provide insight into the genesis of the kind of auxiliary selection found in German, Dutch and Italian. Our analysis of them furthermore suggests a promising strategy for explaining cross-linguistic variation in auxiliary selection in terms of variation in the syntactico-semantic structure of the perfect. In this introductory section, we will first provide some background on the historical situation we will be discussing, then we will lay out the main claims for which we will be arguing in the paper.
KW  - Hilfsverb
KW  - Perfekt
KW  - Mittelenglisch
KW  - perfect
KW  - auxiliary selection
KW  - have
KW  - be
KW  - old english
KW  - middle english
KW  - early modern english
KW  - resultative
KW  - auxiliaries
KW  - counterfactual
KW  - syntax
KW  - semantics
Y1  - 2007
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/9829
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1109921
UR  - https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000588
SN  - 1530-9150
SN  - 0024-3892
N1  - Preprint, später erschienen in: Linguistic inquiry, 41.2010, Nr. 3, S. 389-425, doi:10.1162/LING_a_00002
SP  - 1
EP  - 75
ER  -