Author’s name:
Elena V. Razumnykh – Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
Abstract:
The article presents the results of a study whose aim is to identify and describe the structural and semantic features of the emergence of analytical verb forms habban + Vpp in Old English, which gave rise to the modern verbal forms of the perfect. Three Old English poetic monuments—Beowulf, Andreas, and Elene—were selected as the source material; collectively, these allow for a sufficient sample size and enable a comparison of the characteristics of the phenomenon under investigation in texts that are similar in their genre affiliation but different in their origin. The research methodology includes continuous sampling, content analysis, and verbocentric modeling; the latter is not typically applied in studies of a similar type and therefore offers a new perspective on the issue. The results of the study made it possible to identify three major groups of sentences comprising habban + Vpp as a complex predicate. The first group is characterized by the subject-object structure, direct object as the right actant and explicit possessive meaning due to habban. In the second group, the right valency of the predicate widens, while the possessive meaning becomes less obvious due to additional actants and the overall shift of the sematic focus from habban to the past participle. The third group includes sentences where habban bands with the past participle of intransitive verbs, the right valency of the predicate complex becomes optional, and habban reaches the highest level of grammaticalization. Alliteration patterns of the poetic texts proved to be an additional tool for our analysis, as they revealed that the involvement of habban into alliteration may be significantly different in cases where it appears to be a full verb as compared with those contexts where it makes part of the complex predicate. The results of the study confirm the extensive functional potential of habban in Old English accompanied with active development of perfect tense forms.
| Section | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2025-71-3-22-36 |
| Downloads | 337 |
| Key words | Old English; perfect forms with the verb habban; verbocentric sentence theory; grammalicalization; poetic text |