The diachrony of Dutch hoeven ‘need’ This paper presents a diachronic investigation into the semantic and grammatical evolution of the Dutch negative polarity modal auxiliary Hoeven (‘need’). The study is corpus-based, working with representative samples of occurrences of the verb and of its predecessor, the (originally) full verb behoeven (‘need’), from different stages of Dutch, from Old Dutch until today. It shows how, after the initiation of a tendency to auxiliarize in behoeven in Early New Dutch (which largely ends again after that period), the short form Hoeven splits off from the latter in that same time period and takes the lead as the auxiliary variant from then onwards. It also reveals, however, that in the course of New Dutch Hoeven starts to develop new autonomous uses, in a way comparable to what has happened in the other central modal auxiliaries in Dutch (a case of collective degrammaticalization). Moreover, it shows how, from its emergence onwards, this modal auxiliary develops a wide range of modal and related meanings in a very short time, no doubt due to a strive for (semantic) analogy with the other (and much older) central modals.
Modal auxiliaries in Present Day Dutch are going through a process of ‘re-autonomization’, i.e. they are increasingly used without a main verb elsewhere in the clause, in ways which are not possible in other Germanic languages. Many Germanic languages do allow omission of the main verb when a modal is combined with a directional phrase in the clause. This paper investigates whether the latter phenomenon may have been the cause of the former process in Dutch. A diachronic corpus study of the Dutch modals shows that the answer is negative. The paper offers an alternative suggestion as to how the re-autonomization trend may have emerged.
The squib investigates the dialectal distribution of the Dutch construction type het kan/mag/moet, lit. ‘it can/may/must’, where a modal verb occurs ‘independently’ with an eventive subject and no infinitival complement. The construction is shown to be widely attested not only in traditional dialects of Dutch, but also in Frisian, Low German, and Afrikaans. We suggest that the construction, which does not occur in standard German or English, is an areal feature shared by the West Germanic vernaculars of northwestern Germany and the Low Countries, including the South African ‘side branch’ Afrikaans.
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