Article published in:
Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 159] 2014
► pp. 61–82

The demise of a preterite-present verb

Why was unnan lost?

The group of Old English preterite-present verbs, originally comprising twelve items, was considerably reduced so that only six have survived to the present day. The present paper focuses on the fate of the verb unnan ‘grant’, with an attempt to account for its disappearance from the language. Because of its meaning, in Old English unnan was mainly employed in legal documents, especially wills. It was also attested in religious writings in the context of God. In Early Middle English, the lack of legal texts produced in the vernacular resulted in a considerable decrease in the verb frequency. In religious context unnan was still occasionally found, although the reference to God’s grants was more likely expressed with other verbs. Thus, the study shows that the drop in the frequency of unnan and its subsequent elimination was mainly due to the shortage of English legal texts and the competition with native synonyms.
Published online: 11 September 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.159.04woj
Data

Data

A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325
Compiled by Margaret Laing. <http://​www​.lel​.ed​.ac​.uk​/ihd​/laeme1​/laeme1​.html> (July 2012). Edinburgh: ©2008–The University of Edinburgh.
Bosworth, Joseph & Toller, T. Northcote
1898 An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Digital edition available at <www​.bosworthtoller​.com> (July 2012).Google Scholar
diPaolo Healey, Antonette, Holland, Joan, McDougall, David, McDougall, Ian & Xin Xiang
2009 The Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form, TEI-P5 conformant version, (Toronto: DOE Project 2009, on CD-ROM).Google Scholar
Historical Thesaurus of English
Oxford: OUP: online edition. <www​.oed​.com​/thesaurus> (June 2012).
Harmer, Florence E.
1914 Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Kemble, John Mitchell
1839-1848 Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici. London: English Historical Society.Google Scholar
Markus, Manfred
(ed.) 2006 The Innsbruck Prose Corpus Version 2.2. (CD-ROM).Google Scholar
McSparran, Frances
(ed.) Middle English Compendium (Middle English Dictionary, The Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, HyperBibliography of Middle English). University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service quod​.lib​.umich​.edu​/m​/mec​/index​.html> May 2012
Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford: OUP. <www​.oed​.com> (May 2012).
Robertson, Agnes Jane
1956 Anglo-Saxon Charters. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Stratmann, Francis Henry
1891 A Middle-English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Whitelock, Dorothy
1930 Anglo-Saxon Wills. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar

References

Bately, Janet
2000  Here Comes the Judge: A small contribution to the study of French input into the vocabulary of the law in Middle English. In Placing Middle English in Context [Topics in English Linguistics 35], Irma Traavitsainen, Terttu Nevelainen, Päivi Pahta, & Matti Rissanen (eds), 255–275. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, David
1979 Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
2009 Cuing a new grammar. In The Handbook of the History of English, Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds), 24–44. Malden MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Mincoff, Marco
1972 English Historical Grammar. Sofia: Naouka i Izkoustvo.Google Scholar
Nagle, Stephen J. & Sanders, Sara L.
1998 Downsizing the preterite-presents in Middle English. In Advanced in English Historical Lingustics (1996), Jacek Fisiak & Marcin Krygier (eds), 253–261. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Prokosch, Eduard
1938 A Comparative Germanic Grammar. Baltimore MD: Linguistic Society of America.Google Scholar
Ringe, Donald A.
2006 A History of English, Vol. I: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sievers, Eduard
1903 An Old English Grammar, 3rd edn. Boston MA: Ginnand Company.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
1972 A History of English Syntax. A Transformational Approach to the History of English Sentence Structure. New York NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Google Scholar
Woodbine, George E.
1943 The language of English law. Speculum 18: 395–436. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wright, Joseph & Wright, Mary Elizabeth
1908 Old English Grammar. London: OUP.Google Scholar