The Modals Again in the Light of Historical and Cross-Linguistic Evidence

Author / Editor
De la Cruz, Juan Manuel.

Title
The Modals Again in the Light of Historical and Cross-Linguistic Evidence

Published
Francisco Fernandez, Miguel Fuster, and Juan Jose Calvo, eds. English Historical Linguistics, 1992 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1994), pp. 145-56.

Description
The co-occurence of modals of the type "I shall may go" and participial modal constructions of the type "I have wold" in Chaucer's Bo helps us understand the practical absence of them in post-Medieval English. Through a three-hundred-year process, the bulk of English verbs separated from the modals.

Alternative Title
English Historical Linguistics, 1992.

Chaucer Subjects
Language and Word Studies.
Boece.