The Development of the English Modals

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 27 Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie) course: History and Variation of English II language: English abstract: The question about the grammaticalization process of the modal auxiliary verbs from Old English to Modern English is a highly discussed topic among linguistics and scholars today. It is undisputed that in the English that is spoken today words like 'should' 'could' etc. form a separate category or rather a subcategory 'modal' that does not only syntactically differ from the usual English verbs but also morphologically. That is of course with the exception of a few regional variations such as for example Scots but since the main focus of this paper is on the standard British and American English dialects those regional non-standard dialects will not be taken into consideration here. For every native and average non-native speaker it is natural that modals like 'will' for example don't take the obligatory inflectional ending -s in third person singular present. Or that 'should' 'would' or 'could' do not have past tense meaning although the forms itself are actually a past form. And it is also natural that just those verbs which we subcategorize as modals will neither appear as infinitives with 'to' (*'I have to will') nor do they require 'to' in combination with regular verbs (*'I should to go'). Today we instinctively know that those usual grammatical rules that regular verbs require to be followed in order to correctly be embedded in a sentence don't apply to the modals. How did we get to this point though?In the following paper I want to take a closer look at how the modals developed from regularly inflectional verbs that they still were in Old English to this new category 'modal' which is no longer a full verb that can stand alone in a sentence but more of a grammatical function that signals either epi