ON THE PROBLEM OF THE FUNCTIONAL-GRAMMATICAL SPECIFICITY OF GERMAN VERBS WITH MODAL SEMANTICS
The research describes the role of premodal lexical semantics in grammaticalisation and in forming of the functional-semantic specificity of verbs with modal meaning, their cognitive and historical-cultural determination. German modal verbs are sollen, mьssen, wollen, mцgen, kцnnen, dьrfen. These verbs are preterite-present, which means that their present tense has the form of the strong preterite. Modal verbs are the prototypical linguistic means of modality expression, at the same time there are many other verbs with modal semantics in the periphery of the modal field, which have similar functional-semantic features. The so-called modalized verbs can also express possibility, necessity, desirability, habitual actions and various estimates. In contrast to modal verbs, German modalized verbs are used with particle zu (except the verb lassen). It is very interesting to look at the involvement of verbs with modal semantics in grammaticalisation. There are many studies in the field of grammaticalisation (Lehmann, 1982; Heine, 1984; Bybee, 1994; V. A. Plungian, 1997; Maisak, 2005, and others). These works focussed on many important problems of grammaticalisation, and specifically on the possible lexical sources of grammatical items. In the study we regard grammaticalisation as a semantic process (Heine, 1984). We intend to determine the influence of pre-grammatical semantics on the functional-grammatical forming of the verbs with modal meaning. So on the one hand we define grammaticalisation as the process, in which a lexical word or a word cluster loses some or all of its lexical meaning and starts to fulfil a more grammatical function, on the other hand we try to determine the pre-grammatical specificity of form and content. The historical changes in the premodal semantics of the verbs with modal meaning (lassen, brauchen, haben/seinzu, wissen, pflegen) cause their modern functional-grammatical specificity. These verbs express one type of modality and demonstrate the functional monosemanticity.
Keywords: German modal verbs, functional-grammatical specificity
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Issue: 10, 2014
Series of issue: Issue 10
Rubric: GERMANIC AND ROMANIC LANGUAGES
Pages: 7 — 15
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