De ĐURFAN à NEED : histoire d’une disparition
In Old and Middle English, ĐURFAN is part of the preterite-present verb class. These verbs are considered the ancestors of the Contemporary English modal verbs. ĐURFAN expresses need and necessity. We could then claim that it is the perfect candidate to express modality and be part of the class of m...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires du Midi
2007-12-01
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| Series: | Anglophonia |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/acs/12256 |
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| Summary: | In Old and Middle English, ĐURFAN is part of the preterite-present verb class. These verbs are considered the ancestors of the Contemporary English modal verbs. ĐURFAN expresses need and necessity. We could then claim that it is the perfect candidate to express modality and be part of the class of modal verbs. Yet, it is not this morphological form that we find today. It is NEED we are now dealing with as a modal verb. This latter form is very close to the forms of NIEDAN / NEODIAN and NEDEN we find in Old and Middle English. This paper aims to show why ĐURFAN disappeared in Contemporary English and why NEED emerged, whereas those two forms coexisted in Old and Middle English. Our hypothesis is that ĐURFAN / ĐURFEN indeed disappeared but that the verb NEED (which replaced them) has the same syntactic and semantic characteristics as ĐURFAN, as well as the lexical characteristics it already possessed in Old and Middle English. |
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| ISSN: | 1278-3331 2427-0466 |