Future and movement (1)
Intermingling | Comparative grammar | Grammaticalization | Future tense
We shall be interested here in the grammaticalization of the future tense. The present essay will seek to introduce the concepts, drawing its illustrations from English; the next in the series will examine the phenomenon across (some) languages; and a third will focus specifically on Old Norse.
Grammaticalization, in the broadest sense and abstracting for now from terminology debates, can be defined as the process which, in the history of a language, progressively renders the expression of a notion grammatical.
How is such a notion originally rendered, if not grammatically? Looking at modern English by way of illustration, it seems that the notion of definiteness is grammaticalized, whereas the notion of size is not. The distinction between indefinite (I saw a dog) and definite (the dog seems happy) is carried by grammatical items, namely indefinite articles (a/an in the singular, absence of an article in the plural) or definite articles (the). In contrast, we have to resort to the lexicon to express something pertaining to the size of the dog. Here, the choice is abundant and unregulated, both register and form. It extends to the spectrum from slang to preciosity, archaisms to neologisms or loanwords. It is not limited to any one grammatical category or construct - adjectives, adverbs, complex periphrases and whole clauses have full license.
A colossal dog stands in my way.
The dog dwarfs the cat.
Comparison, metaphor and other stylistic devices further extend the range of possibilities, when what is spoken of gives way to an image bound only by the limits of the imagination. In Lewis Carroll, it is the rat-hole that defines the dimensions of the small passage, after Alice's fall through the rabbit-hole.
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole.
Here is how Alice pictures the notion of shrinking in size, in order to access the small passage.
"Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin."
A wish that later comes true.
“What a curious feeling! […] I must be shutting up like a telescope!”
In the latter sentence, must be is the grammatical vehicle for the expression, thereby (at least partly) grammaticalized, of belief or knowledge, and more broadly, of epistemic modality; modality for the expression of the possibility or necessity for the reality to be a certain way, of epistemic flavor because the possibility is assessed based on some body of knowledge, here empirical (“What a curious feeling!”). Might, may, must belong here. Modality has deontic flavor when is expressed the necessity or degree of freedom for reality to be otherwise: reality has to or is allowed to be transformed to accord with certain rules, norms or desires. The injunctive must belongs here. The flavor of modality is dynamic when the possibility is contingent to some qualities, capabilities or circumstances. For instance, the dynamically modal could - a matter of aptitude - in
“Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!”
The modal verbs we have just reviewed are at home in English grammar. It is legitimate to wonder why - why these are more grammatical than other words, maybe small or telescope - in other words, precisely what makes them grammatical items.
English modal verbs are of a very special kind. They are auxiliary verbs, verbs that, in accordance with etymology, help others to express a notion, more than they themselves carry meaning. They qualify for the category under the sieve of certain criteria, of which we detail briefly a few. First, auxiliaries can be negated by not, while lexical verbs can’t. They further have negative inflected forms, as in He can’t be here before late. Second, they take the first position (inversion with the subject) in an interrogative clause. Must she wear a coat? Third, they can encode a complete verb seen previously. The second could in Alice’s
"Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, […]”
picks up the first complete I could shut up (like a telescope).
Furthermore, they qualify as modal auxiliary verbs, a subset of the former group. Further criteria apply. Contrary to non-modal auxiliary, they show no subject verb agreement. This might happen and not *might-s. They lack untensed forms, namely the unmarked verb, such as be in I’ll be here, and the gerund-participle, such as being in He dislikes being bullied. *He will must make do or *He was canning speak Old English are clearly grammatically wrong. They can take a bare infinitival clause (a clause with an unmarked verb) as their complement. We have
I could shut up like a telescope!
where the bare infinitival clause is highlighted, while the following sentences are ungrammatical:
*I could to shut up like a telescope
*I could shutting up like a telescope
In short, modal verbs constitute a restricted set of words obeying their own rules, and far less bearers of meaning than means to a function.
So far, we have merely clarified the demarcation line between grammatical elements, function words, and lexical elements, content words. Some words belong in the grammar book, others are confined to the dictionary. Yet, we have said nothing about entering grammar: grammaticalization, we claimed, is a process. Let's look at some modal verbs in Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night's Dream was premiered in 1595 or 1596.
Obe. That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm'd
The Tempest in 1610 or 1611
Ste. How now shall this be compassed? Canst
thou bring me to the party?
and
Cal. Within this half hour will he be asleep;
Wilt thou destroy him then?
Early Modern English distinguished between a second-person singular (thou) and a second-person plural (you or ye), with verbs agreeing with a distinctly singular second-person subject (distinctly insofar as a second-person plural form of the same verb might exist). All verbs are concerned, including, as we have just noticed, modal auxiliaries. Again in The Tempest
Ste. Give me thy hand: I am sorry I beat
thee; but, while thou livest, keep a good tongue
in thy head.
In Shakespeare's time, modal verbs were more akin to lexical verbs: they followed the then-current pattern of second-person singular agreement. Lewis Carroll's modal auxiliary morphology, for its part, has departed from the standard conjugation table: it doesn't comply with the modern agreement of lexical verbs, which marks (with an -s suffix) the third person singular.
Such morphological reduction - the alienation of auxiliaries from their original category, that of verbs in general, through the loss of morphological features specific to this category - constitutes, according to linguists, one of the frequent mechanisms along grammaticalization pathways. At this stage, our opening definition of grammaticalization requires revision. We have said, in the broad sense, the linguistic process whereby the expression of a notion is rendered grammatical. In a narrower sense, this evolution is more precisely carried by that of a specific linguistic item, from lexical to grammatical. School debates notwithstanding, this is the idea towards which theorists seem to be converging. Notably, Jerzy Kurylowicz: (Kuryłowicz, 1965)
Grammaticalization consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status, e.g. from a derivative formant to an inflectional one.
An elegant definition is that of James A. Matisoff. Grammaticalization is “a subtype of metaphor”, “a metaphorical shift toward the abstract”. Metaphor, he recalls, means etymologically “carrying beyond”, and can be defined as “an originally conscious or voluntary shift in a word's meaning because of some perceived similarity”. (Matisoff, 1991)
Let's retrace the metaphor for some of our English modal verbs, and get closer to the notion that ultimately interests us: the expression of the future. Here is the drift from Proto-Germanic into Old English and then Middle English for the ancestor of Present Day English to will.
PG *wiljaną (to want) > OE willan (to want, to intend, to desire, to be willing) > ME willen > PDE will
willen still carries the nuances of its parent willan, but its function as an auxiliary has emerged. The verb will, in modern dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster.com, is first defined as the auxiliary of futurity. The Wiktionary, for its part, says “Used to express the future tense, sometimes with an implication of volition or determination when used in the first person”. Intention or willingness contain the abstract notion of future. To intend is to decide, anticipate and prepare for the action to come; willingness desires or envisions it. The lexical meanings of willen fade away, the underlying notion come to prevail: we clearly observe Matisoff’s “metaphorical shift toward the abstract”.
A perspicacious mind will nevertheless have noticed a flaw in the flow of our remarks. We declared our intention to study the grammaticalization of modal verbs, and find ourselves talking, not about modality, but futurity. In fact, languages often conflate the notions of tense (point in time), aspect (extension in time), and mood (modality), making them difficult to disentangle. The modern auxiliary will, to keep with our example, remains polysemic: the context drives the necessary interpretation. Less frequent uses, Merriam-Webster.com tells us, express probability or capability/sufficiency. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, “The Queen’s Croquet Ground”, we read
“No, I didn't,” said Alice: “I don't think it's at all a pity. I said 'What for?'“
“She boxed the Queen's ears— “the Rabbit began. Alice gave a little scream of laughter. “Oh, hush!” the Rabbit whispered in a frightened tone. “The Queen will hear you! You see she came rather late, and the Queen said—[…]”
Here, the Queen “will hear” contingently on a future action, namely that Alice does not remain silent. Therefore, will is a clear operator of the expression of the future. Yet it is only probable that “The Queen will hear”. This depends in particular on Alice's behavior and the Queen's hearing acuity. The nuances of tense and mood intermingle to color an expression that only personal interpretation can resolve.
Theorists have examined at length grand tendencies in grammaticalization: firstly, they record a certain universality of its generic morphological, semantic, phonological or syntactic mechanisms; the unidirectionality of their deployment, from the lexical to the grammatical and its strengthening, is a debated hypothesis we shall evoke shortly. Secondly, a certain universality, across languages, of the notions that become grammaticalized (e.g., modality or future tense) and their specific semantic (some say cognitive) pathways: frequent semantic source-target pairs, from a lexical meaning to its metaphorical abstraction, emerge (e.g., from intention or willingness to futurity).
Grammaticalization is a theory, an idea substantiated by empirical evidence. It has its adherents, and more cautious contributors. It may be judicious here to remark on its premises. Grammar, according to grammaticalization, is a “product of change”: it can “be understood as a historical process embedded in use rather than as a purely abstract synchronic state.” (Hopper, 1996) The phrase “embedded in use” is worth noting here. In the course of its history and use, language is, so to speak, in gestation of its systematisms. Universal mechanisms shape its progression along known semantic pathways. The language gradually emerges from the primitiveness of its fluctuation, from a certain looseness, towards a kind of grammaticalized, ideally ordered state. Based on these premises, the discipline seems to be longing for a large, dual repertoire: that of global mechanisms and that of source-target semantic pairs. Large-scale empirical surveys, such as those carried out by the Africanist Heine (Heine & Reh, 1984), are gathering evidence. Some studies seek to circumscribe and relativize its relevance, without denying it. Ultimately, we can expect to refine our understanding of a language by examining it through the prism of grammaticalization and the encyclopedia of its great tendencies; and we can hope to extract from the universal linguistic pathways recorded truths about human cognition. (Hopper, 1996, p.224-225) In our view, the approach has an additional virtue. By examining the history of forms and meanings, through a kind of etymology of notions, it allows us to appreciate more intensely the polysemy of language, for literary or generally creative purposes.
When meditating on English modal verbs, we have already come across one of the frequent mechanisms on the path to grammaticalization, regardless of the notion at stake - namely, morphological reduction. In Present-day English, the agreement of the modal auxiliary has lost its similarity to that of ordinary verbs. In Shakespeare, we still read
Obe. That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm'd
where the modal auxiliary shares the second-person singular (thou) marker (-st) then carried by all verbs.
In his systematic compilation, Hopper (1996, p.223-225) summarizes seven further mechanisms, as highlighted by Heine & Reh (1984):
Loss in “in semantic complexity, functional significance, and/or expressive value”. Some say semantic bleaching, and we have taken a long look at how the meanings of to will fade.
Loss in “pragmatic and [gain] in syntactic significance”. For illustration, the phrase the fact that traditionally requires the subsequent clause to be true (pragmatically, it is a fact). Recently, this condition seems to be weakening, for example in My opponent has charged me with the fact that I used illegal campaign funds.
Reduction in the “number of members belonging to the same morphosyntactic paradigm”. French negation could resort to numerous reinforcers, of which only pas, and more archaically, point, remain.
Decrease in “syntactic variability”, that is, “position in the clause becomes fixed”. For example, full flexibility in word order for a Latin sentence, less so for its descendant in Old and Middle French, and none at all for the French equivalent.
Increase in “obligatory [character] in some contexts and ungrammatical [character] in others”. Tense, aspect and modality are difficult to express without auxiliaries and conjugation tables. The periphrastic bypass, for example be able to for can, supplies the modal verb's defective forms (namely untensed forms: plain verb form, *I will can come, to-infinitive, *to can, and gerund-participle, *canning) and can therefore be seen as quasi-modal.
Semantic, morphosyntactic, and phonetic coalescence with other units. In English, I am going to take the morning flight to Uppsala becomes in some registers I’m gonna take… or even I ma take…
Loss in “phonetic substance”. (Phonetic erosion applies to the linguistic item itself, not to its coalescence (6) with other units.) For instance, the Old English negator ná wiht (to be compared with the modern no way) follows the path ná wiht > nówiht or nówuht > noght > n’t.
We have become acquainted with grammaticalization as a linguistic process that gradually metamorphoses lexical items into grammatical ones, following established pathways of language evolution. We have, by way of illustration, visited modal verbs from Old to Modern English, and evoked the frequent intermingling of the expression of tense and modality. The future tense auxiliary will, in particular, bears also modal nuances. It has been grammaticalized as a future tense marker by analogy with its predecessor's lexical meaning - intention and willingness.
Another typical pathway in the grammaticalization of the future tense originates from verbs of movement. This is what we shall soon be looking at more closely, through a journey across several languages and continents - we will evoke the Germanic spectrum, and this will lead us in part three to a study of the future tense in Old Norse.
References
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Views on grammaticalization. In Grammaticalization. Wikipedia. Retrieved January 18, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization#Views_on_grammaticalization
Kuryłowicz, J. (1965). The Evolution of Grammatical Categories. Diogenes, 13(51), 55-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/039219216501305105
Matisoff, J. A. (1991). Areal and universal dimensions of grammaticalization in Lahu. In E. C. Traugott & B. Heine (Eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization.
Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved January 18, 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com
Heine B, Reh M. (1984). Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages. Hamburg: Buske