A Diachronic Analysis of the Grammaticalization of English Modal Auxiliaries

In this paper, I investigated the change of preterite-present verbs into modal auxiliaries from the panchronic perspective. When the diachronic process of grammatical- ization is viewed from the theory of language acquisition and parameter resetting in the spirit of Generative Grammar, it is analyzed principally as morpho- syntactic change accompanied by semantic bleaching because a grammar represents a stage in a series of synchronic situation. Most of preterite-present verbs were recategorized as modal auxiliaries through their morpho-syntactic changes. These are triggered by the restriction on finiteness, the loss of object taking ability, the substitute for subjunctive mood and the implication of modal property along with the semantic change from lexical verbs with independent meaning to grammatical markers with modality. While preterite-present verbs raised from the lexical category V to the functional category T overtly in OE, modal auxiliaries are base-generated in the position of T after recategorization. I argue that the recategorization of the central modal verbs began at late OE and was almost compete ca. 1400 at the latest.