In Old English, the present/past dichotomy of the Germanic verbal system was supplemented by the development of periphrastic forms such as the perfect and pluperfect. However, the inflected past tense continued to be used beside these newer forms to express similar temporal content. The research presented here aims to provide accurate quantitative data on the distribution within Old English texts both of the periphrastic forms and of semantically comparable preterites. Upon analysis, these data reveal a substantial degree of synchronic variation among Old English texts in their use of these grammatical categories, with no observable diachronic trends. The evidence does not suggest that this variation is grammatically motivated; it is hypothesised that the preterite and the periphrastic forms differed in their perceived stylistic value, although the exact details of such a difference may no longer be recoverable.

In Old English, passive-type constructions involving a copula and a passive participle could be used to express both events and states. Two different types of copula are found in these constructions: weorðan, meaning 'become', and wesan and beon, meaning 'be'. There has been some dispute as to how the meaning of these copulas relates to the meaning of the construction as a whole, in both its eventive and its stative uses, and whether any of these constructions was grammaticalized in the sense that its meaning was non-compositional. We propose a semantic model that represents these constructions compositionally and test it against a selected corpus of Old English texts in order to address two questions: whether the data provide evidence of non-compositional meaning that would suggest grammaticalization, and whether other factors are also responsible for the choice of copula. Our analysis suggests that the attested Old English passives are fully compatible with a compositional analysis; we also discuss additional semantic factors that may be responsible for the lower frequency of passives with weorðan.

In Early Modern English, verbal negation was commonly expressed by the addition of not directly after a lexical verb, a construction which subsequently underwent a pronounced decline in frequency as part of broader changes in verbal syntax. Even after the rise of the auxiliary do, however, constructions with the same surface form as the earlier pattern have continued to be used as a stylistically marked alternative. Data from the Hansard Corpus are presented here to show an increase in the frequency of these constructions since the mid twentieth century. The syntactic environments in which contemporary postverbal negation occurs are compared to the patterns existing in Early Modern English, and evaluated in the light of trends within constituent negation. The interpretation proposed is that a lexical split has occurred to produce two separate lexemes of the form not, with different syntactic properties. Postverbal negation would thus occur in Present-day English when speakers choose to make use of the new lexeme.

A principled model of mood selection in Old English (OE) has long proved elusive. We analyse the distribution of the indicative and subjunctive in the OE Bede in light of the Latin original, the syntactic construction, and a semantic model of modality which classifies clauses according to whether the situation is represented as holding in the actual or in a possible world. The choice of mood in the Latin and OE Bede differs enough to rule out slavish imitation. In certain clauses, such as result and purpose clauses, the construction type, modality, and grammatical mood all match; however, in other clauses, such as concessives, the OE subjunctive is systematically used whether the situation is represented as actual or possible. Where the grammatical mood of OE forms is ambiguous, modal verbs are often seemingly used as a substitute for the subjunctive. Our results show that while the choice of mood in the OE Bede largely correlates with the syntactic construction, the subjunctive is close to being semantically redundant. This growing redundancy may have been one of the factors in the diminishing role of inflectional mood in the later history of English.To provide a starting point for discussion of diachronic tendencies in the role of mood, Latin may be used to exemplify the use of the subjunctive in older Indo-European languages. 2 In Latin, the subjunctive could be used freely in main clauses, and there were many minimal pairs distinguished by mood alone (examples after Allen et al. 1903). 1. a. Imus go.1PL.IND 'We are going' b. Eamus go.1PL.SBJV 'Let's go' 2. a. Beati estis blessed.NOM.PL be.2PL.IND 'You are blessed' b. Beati sitis blessed.NOM.PL be.2PL.SBJV 'May you be blessed' 3. a. Si monebo, audiet if warn.1SG.FUT.IND hear.3SG.FUT.IND 'If I warn, he will hear' b. Si moneam, audiat if warn.1SG.SBJV hear.3SG.SBJV 'If I were to warn, he would hear'However, already in Latin there is a growing rigidity in the selection of mood (see Appendix 2). For example, the sequence-of-tense rules once restricted to indicative constructions were also extended to the subjunctive (Clackson & Horrocks 2007: 58), while the restricted use of potential subjunctives in Latin (e.g. Allen et al. 1903) contrasts with the broader range of potential optatives still visible in Homeric Greek (see Goodwin 1889: 77). In many contexts, a change of mood also requires the assumption of a different syntactic structure, and even when the change does not lead to ungrammaticality the resulting sentence may still be of marginal acceptability, in the sense of not being the most felicitous or unmarked expression of a given meaning.

A lack of consensus has existed regarding the interaction of English modals with categories such as tense, and individual modal forms can vary in the extent to which they make assertions regarding temporal reference. The present work attempts to provide a compositional semantic account of English modals by proposing that these forms may be inflected both for tense and for mood. The crosslinguistic status of inflectional moods such as the subjunctive is examined; it is argued that an inflectional subjunctive exists in Modern English with semantic properties similar to those of comparable forms in older Indo-European languages, and the extent to which linguistic cues would permit learners of English to acquire such a category is discussed. Data on English modals are reviewed in light of the analysis proposed here to determine its compatibility with observed usage. It is suggested that the analysis proposed here has certain advantages over models in which the observed semantic range of English modals is presented in terms of an unprincipled heterogeneity.