Ilse Wischer

Dynamic have in North American and British Isles English

There are two important differences between American English and British English with respect to main verb have . First, American English typically employs do -support in constructions such as Do you have any coffee? while traditional British English does not. Secondly, American English typically does not use have in expressions such as I took a shower whereas British Isles English does: I had a shower . In this article, we discuss the possibility that there is a connection between these two facts. We argue that the connection lies in the failure of have in North American English to acquire the full range of dynamic meanings that it has acquired in other varieties of English, and suggest language contact as one explanation for this phenomenon.

Will and shall as markers of modality and/or futurity in Middle English

In the following paper I will approach the question of how will and shall lost their modal meanings to become future markers, i.e. in what constructions they were used and what specific meanings they conveyed in these linguistic contexts that allowed an interpretation in a mere future sense. Bybee et al. (The Evolution of Grammar. Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World, University of Chicago Press, 1994: 244) define a genuine future tense as “a prediction on the part of the speaker that the situation in the proposition, which refers to an event taking place after the moment of speech, will hold”. Thus, as a mere future a linguistic item must be devoid of any modal meaning and express just a prediction. Although willan and sculan still occurred as lexical verbs in Old English, they had already developed auxiliary status and were used in periphrastic constructions (cf. Wischer, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 42: 165–178, 2006). Here they most often conveyed a deontic modal meaning (of volition or obligation). On the basis of data drawn from the ME part of the Helsinki Corpus I hope to shed some light on the use of will and shall in ME, as well as to contribute to a better understanding of the grammaticalisation process of future grams in general.

Aspects of Grammaticalization : Current Resources and Future Prospects

1 This article is a revised version of the Invitation Fellowship Lecture that I gave at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, in March 2010 in conjunction with my visit to Japan funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. I would like to thank Professor Fujio Nakamura for inviting me to Japan as well as Professor Minoji Akimoto for giving me the chance to talk at his university. I would also like to thank all those present for an interesting discussion on a number of issues related to my lecture. Aspects of Grammaticalization: Current Resources and Future Prospects