Constructions and Environments

This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. Loss of the high-frequency verb weorðan 'become' is explained as a result of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. The merger of is 'is' and bið 'shall be, is generally' into a single suppletive verb is related to the development of a general analytic future shall benally, the co-occurrence of multiple changes led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing copulas, from which they analogically adopted full productivity.