| The New English (NE) modal verbs (can, must, may, shall, will) are marked by unique syntactic, morphological, and semantic characteristics. The cognates to these verbs in Old English (OE), however, cannot be distinguished by the exact same criteria due to the great changes that have occurred between the two stages of the language. This study examines the role of the OE cognates (cunnan, motan, magan, sculan, willan) in order to determine if the development of the class of modal verbs was one of the many changes that took place between OE and NE, or if this unique class of verbs already existed in OE, and, if so, how these verbs were then distinguished from all other OE verbs. A total of approximately thirty five hundred instances were collected from four OE prose sources and one OE poetry source, running from as early as the seventh century to as late as the eleventh in order to establish a firm data base for analysis, and to detect any changes within the OE period.;This investigation concludes that motan, magan, and sculan are modals in OE. The evidence indicates that these verbs were unique in that they always must co-occur with an uninflected infinitive, they never take noun direct objects, and they never appear as an infinitive governed by another verb. Apparent counter examples are explained as archaic frozen forms, or as examples of ellipsis where an infinitive is supplied by implication. Willan is well on its way to being a modal, being used in only twelve percent of the instances as a non-modal. Cunnan displays an almost fifty-fifty split between modal and non-modal usage; however, similarities to the modals, such as taking only the uninflected infinitive, indicate its eventual inclusion into that category. The OE modal's unique characteristics are substantiated by contrasting these five verbs against all the OE verbs occurring in constructions similar to those of the OE modals, as presented by Callaway in The Infinitive in Anglo-Saxon. In addition, this study also presents the most common elliptical patterns occurring in the data, as well as the various orderings found of the four major sentential elements: subject, modal, object, verb. |
