The Status of Passive Constructions in Old English

Abstract

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.

The Diachronic Development of Agency Prepositions in Old and Middle English

“…The grammaticalization of passive constructions was still under way in OE (Traugott 1992; Mailhammer & Smirnova 2013). The OE passive is not seen as an independent construction (Petré 2018), and there is “a lack of consensus both on the grammatical status of OE passives and on the criteria that could be used to assess this” (Jones & Macleod 2017:86). Nevertheless, there was an OE construction traditionally treated as the OE proto-passive.…”

“…Mitchell (1985) has serious doubts whether fram , þurh , mid , and of were truly agentive and suggests that the idea of agency in the passive may not have existed until the development of by as the default agentive preposition (hence the wide variety of prepositions deployed for this role). Kilpiö (1989) and Jones and Macleod (2017) concur that the expression of agency in OE was not fully grammaticalized. Although occurring most frequently with personal agents, fram still retained its basic meaning in many instances (‘separation from,’ ‘coming from a source’), and, thus, it is not possible to determine whether a phrase such as fram Gode sended ‘sent by/from God’ was truly agentive (Mitchell 1985:§814, 338).…”

Further remarks on the deflexion and grammaticalization of the Old English past participle with habban

“…Other authors hold that this construction is not grammaticalised in Old English (Petré & Cuyckens, 2008 or even that it remains fully analysable in this period (Jones & MacLeod, 2018). The following arguments have been put forward in favour of the grammaticalisation of the passive construction: the existence of explicit agreement between the subject and the past participle (Traugott, 1992: 192), the expression of syntactic agents (Denison, 1993: 423), the development of the have-perfect (Toyota, 2008: 43) and the avoidance of coordination between adjectives and passive participles in the same copulative construction (Petré, 2014: 122).…”