< Back to previous page

Project

The development of the conditional use of modal verbs in the West-Germanic

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.

Date:1 Oct 2012 →  30 Sep 2015
Keywords:syntactic change, grammaticalisation, corpus linguistics, semantic change, modal verbs, West Germanic, conditionals
Disciplines:Phonetics and phonology, Syntax, Italian language, Diachronic linguistics, Historical linguistics, Corpus linguistics, Dialectology