engleski

Diachronic Analysis of Aspectual Preverbs and Post-verbal Particles in English

This dissertation examines preverbs and post-verbal particles expressing aspectuality in early English. Preverbs are also known as verbal prefixes such as ge- in the Old English verb gegladian ‗cheer up‘ or ā- in the verb āstreccan ‗stretch out‘, whereas post-verbal particles are preposition-like adverbs that come after a verb and thus comprise a phrasal verb, such as the particle up in Modern English cheer up or the particle out in Modern English stretch out. The dissertation starts from the hypothesis that English has several well-developed systems of aspect, one of which is expressed by preverbs and post-verbal particles. Besides investigating how English expressed aspect by means of preverbs that have died out, the aims also include revisiting aspect and expanding the current analysis of aspectual systems in English and with contrastive insights in relation to Croatian. The approach taken in this dissertation is eclectic. In order to account for the phenomenon of aspect, a wide range of theories have been combined such as a number of aspectual theories, as well as some more recent theories such as Grammaticalization Theory and Lexicalization Theory. For the purpose of this research I have used two basic corpora. For Old English, it was The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. For Middle English, The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English. According to previous research, Old English had seven prefixes that could perform an aspectual function. They were looked up in the corpus and the three most frequent prefixes (ge-, a- and for-) are analysed here. Their analysis gives an account how preverbs express aspect in early English and thus contributes to an understanding of aspect in diachrony. The preverbs a-, ge- and for- are traditionally thought to be derivational prefixes, but ample evidence in the dissertation shows many of their inflectional properties. Their decline and loss coincides with the decline and loss of all other inflectional suffixes that were used to mark case, gender, verb person and other grammatical functions, as English was changing from a more synthetic type of language to a more analytic type. The prefixes a-, ge- and for- show some typical features of grammaticalization. The investigation of their etymologies showed that once they were both content items which changed into grammatical words and then reduced to an inflectional affix. The preverb a- had a stronger capacity to express perfectivity than the prefix ge-. The preverb ge- is four times more frequent than the prefix a-, but in more than half the cases its meaning is not aspectual. The preverb for- was also grammaticalized as a marker of perfectivity, but only in 35% of the cases.

aspect; preverbs; prefixes; grammaticalization

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