On the grammaticalization of temporal–aspectual heads: The case of Germanversprechen‘promise’

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter deals with the origin and the development of the functional use of the predicate versprechen ‘promise’ in the history of German. Synchronically, it illustrates that versprechen can be used in two different ways in Present-Day German: either as a lexical verbal head or as a functional verbal head. It also demonstrates to what extent these uses differ and accounts for where these differences come from. Diachronically, it shows that versprechen grammaticalized into a prospective aspect marker in Early New High German (1350–1650), and illustrates that grammaticalization is upward and leftward in the syntactic structure. Accordingly, it is argued that versprechen as a functional verbal head first started embedding DP complements and, as time went on, extended its usage to select infinitives as well, giving rise to a subject-to-subject raising analysis.