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 fr 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