The group of Old English preterite-present verbs, originally comprising 12 items, was considerably reduced so that only half of them, i.e. can, dare, may, must, shall and owe, have survived to the present day. The other forms, i.e. dugan ‘avail’, munan ‘remember’, genuhan ‘suffice’, þ urfan ‘need’, and unnan ‘grant’, were mostly eliminated in Middle English, with one verb, witan ‘know’, lost in the Early Modern English period. The present paper focuses on the fates of the verb unnan (ME unnen) chiefly found in the South (Wełna 1996: 145), which is claimed to have “died out early” (Mincoff 1972: 292).
The study examines the incidence of the verb unnan in Old and Middle English texts in order to establish its dialectal distribution in the two periods. Such an analysis is expected to reveal the time and circumstances of the loss of the verb. Another purpose of the study is to identify the potential causes of the disappearance of unnan, examining both language internal factors, such as morphological changes in the forms of the word or the existence of its native synonyms, and language external ones, i.e. the influence of foreign items of similar meaning.
The data come from the electronic corpora of historical English texts, including The Dictionary of Old English Corpus Database, The Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
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