Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uchinews!news
From: need@bloomfield.uchicago.edu (Barbara Need)
Subject: Modals as evidence of creolization
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: bloomfield.uchicago.edu
Message-ID: <D4zIwy.JGy@midway.uchicago.edu>
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: University of Chicago -- Academic Information Technologies
References: <794354924snz@storcomp.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 1995 20:43:45 GMT
Lines: 62

In article <794354924snz@storcomp.demon.co.uk> philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk  
(Phil Hunt) writes:

[Stuff deleted]

> > > English can be regarded as a creole based on OE and Norman French.
> > 
> > Well, no. There is no evidence that English after the conquest went  
> > through either pidginization or creolization (at least not as I
> > understand these terms). These are distinct processes and the language 
> > situation in England was not one of these. I admit there may have been
> > a kind of diglossia, with the conquerers speaking French and the
> > locals English, and  
> > there may have been a kind of pidgen English spoken by the French, but  
> > that is not the source of Modern English, which was well on its way to  
> > losing case endings (often cited as a result of creolization). Look at  
> > some English from just before and just after the conquest. There are
> > no major changes, just continuing development of already existing
> > tendancies. (A good source is the Peterborough Chronicle  
> > which goes until Stephen's death.)
> 
> You might well be right here. But IMO the way that particles like "can",
> "must" etc are used in English, when the equivalents in OE and Norman
> French are AFAIK normal infinitive verbs, suggests to me that 
> creolization, or something similar, has occured.
> 
> -- 
> Phil Hunt...philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk
> Majority rule for Britain!

Oh dear, you have just pushed my buttons. This is my dissertation topic.  
Actually, there is evidence that in the older Germanic languages, several  
of these verbs (called "particles" above, but tehy are techinaclly modal  
verbs) were LESS verblike than they are now in non-English Germanic. In  
Old English, _may_ was very much an auxiliary (I am basing this on the  
number of pages that came out of the printer from the construction _may_ +  
verb as opposed to the alternatives (_may_ could, at least according to  
the data, occur with nouns, sentential objects, and prepositional  
obejects, it meant 'to have power, benefit, be able')). I don't have the  
details worked out yet, but my guess is that the non-auxiliary uses are  
very old. Old English _can_ on the other hand, was not an auxiliary until  
the end of the period, showing up more often with a noun or a sentence. In  
Middle English, some of these verbs actually acquired more verblike forms  
(_shall_ picked up an infinitive, lacking in OE).

I have not looked at the situation in other older Germanic languages in  
depth, but I do not feel we can ascribe the development of the modals to  
contact with French (especially as the verbs which translate them into  
French behave the way the German and Norwegian verbs do, even if they are  
not cognates). Part of my reasoning is the above, part of is also that  
none of the literature on the development of modals has even hinted at  
such a use, and part of it is that the use of these verbs as full verbs  
with objects continued well into Middle English. If their current use were  
the result of creolization, I would expect to see a break in the stream of  
change, and this just doesn't happen.

I would be willing to discuss this more, but perhaps it would be better by  
e-mail (unless there is enormous interest). I should be contacted by  
e-mail at barbara@sapir.uchicago.edu

Barbara Need
University of Chicago--Linguistics
