Ingressive biginnen in Middle English: the development of a textual function

The topic of this paper is the ingressive aspect as expressed by the Middle English verb biginnen, which is investigated by means of an analysis of its past-tense occurrences in the period 1050-1640, based on an exhaustive sample from LEON 0.3 (Petré 2011). Originally, ingressive biginnen had two functions: (i) At the level of the clause it emphasized duration of the event; (ii) At the textual level it made explicit for the reader the overlap with other events. (1), where the subsequent building of the wall and castle requires that the ditch is finished, illustrates (i). (2), where the singing and weeping are clearly concurrent, illustrates (ii). (1) He bigon to deluen; dic swiðe muchele. Þer-uppe stenene wal; þe wes strong ouer-al. ane burh he arerde. ‘He began/undertook to dig a very great ditch. Above it a stone wall, that was strong everywhere, and a castle he raised.’ (a1275(c1205)) (2) [About a priest who cannot sing] Þer was a gentyl-womman þat satt behynd hym & hard hym syng, & sho began to wepe; and he, trowyng þat sho wepid for swettnes of his voyse, began to syng lowder þan he did tofor. ‘There was a gentlewoman who sat behind him and heard him sing, and she began to weep; and he, thinking that she wept for the sweetness of his voice, began to sing louder than he did before.’ (c1450) The contrast between the two functions has only been hinted at, in a synchronic study of Old English by Los (2000). Their further development and its significance has not yet been examined in detail. Importantly, I argue that this development provides early evidence for a far-reaching shift in the way narratives are structured in English. Old English grammar favoured narratives in serial fashion, construing events as bounded, i.e. completed (or reaching their terminal point) and marked off from other events, e.g. by means of time adverbs such as þa ‘then’. By contrast, Present-Day English also makes significant use of unbounded construal, which encodes events as on-going in a single prolonged ‘now’, and overlapping. While this is done most clearly through progressive aspect (he is walking and looking around), in the past tense it is mainly achieved by means of ingressives (Carroll, von Stutterheim & Nuese 2004: 206), which recast the ‘now’ into a ‘from this point on’, and construing an event as open-ended, and may emphasize overlap with other events, as in (2), which therefore may be considered as typical of unbounded language use. My analysis shows that between early and late Middle English, biginnen clearly shifts its preference from (i), more typical of bounded language use, to (ii), more typical of unbounded language use, and in absolute frequencies function (ii) increases as well. Methodologically, my case study shows how detailed corpus analysis can provide diachronic support for the difference in narrative construal between English and other Germanic languages, which has so far mainly been examined by means of psycholinguistic experimental research.status: publishe