THE AUXILIARY-VERB-PLUS-INFIMTIVE CONSTRUCTION G? OLD OCCITAN A few years ago I began making lists of the most frequently occurring nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the poems of the troubadours. I made lists ofthese parts of speech for each oftwenty troubadours, and I also combined the lists into general lists (the combined lists). The results of that research were reported at Kalamazoo and elsewhere. The combined list of the most frequently used verbs [Table 1] shows that the top ranks are occupied by the verbs esser and aver, which can also be used as auxiliaries in forming past tenses, as well as with other kinds of complements. The next most frequently used verb on the combined list isfar, which may be used with various complements and also in the causative construction. Next in order come the frequently used modal auxiliaries voler, poder and saber. A fourth modal, dever, is in twelfth place. The raw numbers for the occurrences of voler, poder and saber are quite close in the sample of twenty troubadours which I have used. Of the twenty most frequently occurring verbs, no less than ten, including eight of the first twelve, are commonly used to introduce an infinitive. This paper uses that observation as a starting point for a brief introductory analysis of the grammatical structure of auxiliary verbs followed by infinitive in Old Occitan. A recent book by Gérard-Raymond Roy: Contribution à l'analyse du syntagme verbal: Etude morpho-syntaxique et statistique des coverbes conveniently compares the remarks of grammarians on the auxiliary verb. They have been prolific in their invention of terminology, but there is no agreement amongst them. Roy therefore therefore creates his own terms, and I shall adopt here one of them: the coverb. By coverbs, Roy means those verbs which can be used to introduce an infinitive (either directly or after a preposition). A coverb differs formally from an auxiliary in that the auxiliary introduces a past participle, in order to make a compound tense, whereas a coverb introduces an infinitive, with the relation between the verbs often having something to do with the attitude ofthe subject to the action ofthe infinitive (35). Several tables serve to introduce the results of my analyses.1 Table 2 gives a list of the most frequently used coverbs in the sample, and Table 3 a list of the most commonly used infinitives. The listings are then given for the individual troubadours of the sample: their F. R. P. Akehurst use of coverbs in Table 4 and of infinitives in Table 5. These lists were compiled as follows: A computer-generated concordance for each of the troubadours of the sample was created. Then the concordance was inspected and all the infinitives noted.2 The grammatical analysis of each sentence containing an infinitive then revealed whether the infinitive was governed by a coverb. Lists were compiled of: the coverbs used and their frequency [Table 4], and the infinitives so governed [Table 5]. Since one occurrence of a coverb can govern more than one infinitive, it happened that the number of infinitives governed by poder was more than the number of occurrences of the verb poder itself. (For an example of how this occurs, see stanza 5 of Poem 9 of Guilhem of Poitiers). The lists for the individual troubadours were combined to give the overall figure for the whole group. The lists were always ordered in descending order offrequency. The troubadour whose language is often considered typical, Bernard de Ventadour, uses coverbs 321 times in his 44 poems, an average of 7.3 coverbs per poem. These coverbs are used with a total of 124 different infinitives. The coverb followed by infinitive construction may thus be considered an important one for the language ofthe troubadours. The main modal verbs poder, voler, saber are occasionally replaced by periphrastic expressions which have the same meaning. Thus instead of poder, the poet may write: aver poder de, or esser poderos de; for saber he may use instead aver sabenssa de or aver saber de, or even by redoubling aver engenh e saber de. The largest number of periphrastic modal auxiliary verbs have the same meaning as voler...
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