ON THE SYNTACTIC STATUS OF THE VERB <i>BE TO </i>IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

Seppänen, Aimo

doi:10.1515/angl.1979.1979.97.6

Angl

1979

DOI: 10.1515/angl.1979.1979.97.6

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ON THE SYNTACTIC STATUS OF THE VERB BE TO IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

Aimo Seppänen¹

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2013

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“…Huddleston & Pullum : 206; Quirk et al. : 141‐2; for a detailed discussion of the syntactic status of be to in Present Day English, see Seppänen ). Since be to is different from core modals, on the one hand, and semi‐modals such as have to , on the other hand, one solution is to refer to it as a ‘marginal modal’.…”

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The Demise of the Being to V Construction

Hundt

2013

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This paper revisits a construction that is rare in historical data, namely the combination of being with an infinitive, as in They being to arrive early that afternoon, all necessary preparations had been made. In early and late Modern English, the BE TO construction had a fuller paradigm than it does in Present Day English, where it is (almost) exclusively used in tensed forms. The focus in this paper is on part of the paradigm of the BE TO construction, i.e., instances with a present participle form of be. Relevant neighbouring constructions are being Ving and having to V, but the construction also needs to be discussed against the background of developments in the system of auxiliaries and future time expressions. On the basis of evidence from historical text databases and corpora, this paper provides the first detailed description of the syntactic contexts, functions and distribution of the being to V construction. In a next step, corpus data are used to discuss possible reasons (i.e., system dependency, paradigmatic attrition, competition and distributional fragmentation) for its apparent demise. The study thus contributes to the still somewhat underexplored area of syntactic loss.

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confidence: 99%

The Demise of the Being to V Construction

Hundt

2013

Trans of the Philol Soc

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ON THE SYNTACTIC STATUS OF THE VERB BE TO IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

Cited by 1 publication

References 1 publication

The Demise of the Being to V Construction

The Demise of the Being to V Construction

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