English language and linguistics research seminar: Freja Lauridsen (Lund University): Old English (ge)munan and the emergence of modal mun

The preterite-present verb (ge)munan, meaning ‘to remember’ or ‘to be mentally active’, is attested throughout the Old English period (450-1150). Deriving from the Proto-Germanic preterite-present lexical verb munan, it belongs to a class of verbs many of which grammaticalised into modal auxiliaries during Old and Middle English. (Ge)munan itself appears to have undergone grammaticalisation, as suggested by numerous attestations of modal mun in Middle English and Early Modern English, before ultimately being displaced by the dominant English modals: can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, and must.

A central question is whether the development of modal mun can be traced directly back to the Old English verb (ge)munan, or whether (ge)munan fell out of use during the Old English period, with modal mun subsequently entering English through contact with Old Scandinavian – a view commonly assumed, yet largely unexamined, in the literature (Visser 1969, 1441; Eitelmann 2013, 134; OED, s.v. mun).

This paper addresses this issue by examining whether (ge)munan consistently exhibited strictly lexical behaviour throughout the Old English period, or whether it displays early signs of grammaticalisation that might indicate the onset of modalisation. To address this question, the study presents a corpus-based analysis of (ge)munan, focusing on its distribution, syntactic properties, and frequency in the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, which comprises the surviving body of Old English prose and poetry.

This analysis lays the groundwork for further investigation into the diachronic relationship between (ge)munan and the modal mun, and contribute to the broader question of whether the modal mun arose through internal grammaticalisation or via contact-induced borrowing.

References

Eitelmann, Matthias. 2013. “Remembering (ge)munan.” In Comparative Studies in Early Germanic Languages, edited by Gabriele Diewald, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, and Ilse Wischer, 127-150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED). n.d. Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.oed.com.

Visser, Frederikus T. 1969. An Historical Syntax of the English Language III: First Half: Syntactical Units with Two Verbs. Leiden: Brill.