Futural betydelse och hjälpverbssyntax hos vilja 1526–1950

• Grammaticalization studies have mainly focused on the evolution of grams. The question of whether the semantic and syntactic properties so often found to co-evolve in grammaticalization studies also disappear simultaneously has hardly been addressed at all. This study focuses on the loss of future meaning of the Swedish auxiliary vilja, and investigates what happens with the raising properties associated with grammatical meaning in auxiliaries when that grammatical meaning is lost but the form survives in use, albeit with meanings located on the more lexical stretch of the lexical-grammatical continuum. The corpus material consists of The Swedish Academy Dictionary, and the study focuses on examples with inanimate and expletive subjects. Results indicate that the future meaning of vilja was frequently used during the 16th and 17th centuries, less so during the 18th century and hardly at all during the 19th century. Vilja with future meaning was possible to passivize over, with no change of meaning, a common indicator of subject to subject raising. This is no longer possible today. The results would thus imply that semantic and syntactic properties depend on each other not only when auxiliaries grammaticalize, but also when they vanish

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Keyword

grammatikalisering

Svenska

Swedish

Språkhistoria

Language History

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)