Research Explorer

Project

The development of the conditional use of modal verbs in the West-Germanic
Code
3E001412
Duration
01 October 2012 → 30 September 2015
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund, Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Italian language
    • Corpus linguistics
    • Diachronic linguistics
    • Dialectology
    • Historical linguistics
    • Phonetics and phonology
    • Syntax
Keywords
West Germanic semantic change grammaticalisation modal verbs conditionals syntactic change corpus linguistics Linguistics
 
Project description
 

The project traces the historical development of the ‘conditional’ use of modal verbs in West Germanic, testing the hypothesis that semantic change correlates with syntactic change, as different structural positions appear to correlate with different modal meanings on the grammaticalisation cline. This comparative project is based on a large-scale corpus study of historical Dutch, English, Frisian, High and Low German.