The Periphrastic Subjunctive in the Old English Multiple Glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels

Abstract

The recessive nature of the subjunctive as a formal category in Old English is witnessed in the use of alternative grammatical structures other than inflectional subjunctives in contexts of non-fact modality. An increasing analytic reliance on grammatical devices signalling nonfact modality (e.g. gif 'if', sua hua 'whoever', etc.) both fostered and facilitated the occurrence of the indicative in such contexts. The modal verbs magan, *sculan and willan served as fully independent verbs in Old English, but even during the Old English period there appears to have been a 'modern' tendency to use modal constructions involving a (subjunctive) modal + infinitive construction, instead of an inflectional subjunctive, with little (or no) underlying sense of non-modal notional meaning. 1 In the Old Northumbrian (ONbr) interlinear gloss to the Latin text of the Lindisfarne Gospels (British Library, MS Cotton Nero D.iv; henceforth Li), the increasing lack of direct correspondence between contexts of non-fact modality and the subjunctive in Old English is attested in the widespread tendency for present-indicative forms in -s and -ð to supplant subjunctive forms, e.g. 7 swiðe bebead him þaette hia ne aewades ł mersades hine L et uehementer comminabatur eis ne manifestarent illum 'And he very much commanded them that they should not make him known' MkGl (Li) 3.12, or for indicative forms to alternate with subjunctive forms, which in ONbr ended in -a/-e/-o in both 1 For detailed discussion of the semantics of the Old English modal verbs see Standop

The subjunctive in the Lindisfarne gloss

“…pedagogic concerns: the glossator is attempting to instruct the reader, in this case, in Latin. Investigations of multiple glosses of grammatical variants include present tense be (Bolze 2013(Bolze , 2016, inflectional and periphrastic subjunctive (Cole 2015), verbal tenses (Kotake 2006), andnegation (van Bergen 2008). These are further discussed below.…”

“…With respect to the subjunctive, previous investigations into the subjunctive mood in the Lindisfarne glosses, apart from Bolze's (2013Bolze's ( , 2016 research into present tense be and Cole's (2015) article on the periphrastic subjunctive, tend to focus on lexical verbs. Hotz (1882) reports exact counts for instances of subjunctive use in Lindisfarne, but in each case he must report figures for "indeterminate forms", which could be indicative or subjunctive.…”

A native origin for Present-Day Englishthey, their, them

“…Similarly, double glosses involving personal pronouns and se-forms reflect the overlap in 10. Studies which have demonstrated the validity of the gloss for the study of OE linguistic phenomena include Kroch & Taylor (1997) and Nagucka (1997) on word order; Nagucka (1997) and Ingham (2006) on negative concord; Nagucka (1997) on finite clause use; van Bergen (2008) on negative contraction; Cole (2012Cole ( , 2014Cole ( , 2015Cole ( , 2017b on verbal morphosyntax; Walkden (2016) on null subjects and Kotake (2006) on a number of syntactic phenomena including the subjunctive.…”