ABSTRACT |
This paper is concerned with the expression of verbal necessity in Dan
Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwit. This Middle English text,
representative of the Kentish dialect, shows interesting idiosyncratic
features in the field of orthography and lexis which have been the
subject of different studies (cf. Scahill 2002). The aim of this study
is to check whether Ayenbite of Inwit is also idiosyncratic from
a semantic-syntactic point of view by examining verbs expressing
necessity, since a preliminary overview of the text has revealed that
Dan Michel has a strong preference for the verb bihoven (>PDE
behove, see MED s.v. bihoven), which was quite a marginal
verb, rather than for highly frequent verbs such as thurven,
which was dominant in Old English (cf. Bosworth and Toller s.v.
þurfan) or neden (>PDE need), which was incipiently
gaining ground in Middle English. This paper analyses the contexts in
which behove occurs and pays close attention to its syntactic
function and its semantic connotations in order to verify one of these
two hypotheses, namely that either (i) the context in the Ayenbite
requires the necessity nuances conveyed by bihoven, or that (ii)
the context of the Ayenbite is not different from any other
Middle English text and the author opted for bihoven as a
syntactic-semantic substitute of thurven and neden. The
latter hypothesis would be in line with the situation attested in other
Germanic languages, such as Dutch, which have kept cognates of behove
as primary verbs expressing necessity (cf. Fischer and van der Leek
1987: 115, note 12 and Mackenzie 1997: 81).
References:
Bosworth, Joseph & T. Northcote Toller. 1898. An Anglo-Saxon
Dictionary. Supplement by T. Northcote Toller 1921. Enlarged Addenda
and Corrigenda by Alistair Campbell 1972. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fischer,
Olga & Frederike van der Leek. 1987.
“A
‘Case’ for the Old English Impersonal.” In Willem Koopman, Frederike van
der Leek, Olga Fischer & Roger Eaton (eds.), Explanation and
Linguistic Change. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp.
79-120.
Kurath, Hans (ed.). 1982-. Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor,
University of Michigan Press.
Mackenzie, Lachlan. 1997. Principles and Pitfalls of English Grammar.
Bussum: Coutinho.
Scahill, John. 2002. “Dan Michel: Fossil or innovator?” In Fanego,
Teresa, María José López-Couso, Javier Pérez-Guerra, Belén Méndez-Naya
and Elena Seoane (eds.), Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de
Compostela, 7–11 September 2000: Volume 2. Sounds, Words, Texts and
Change, pp. 189–200.
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