| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,860,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥660,000)
Fiscal Year 2016: ¥910,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥210,000)
Fiscal Year 2015: ¥1,040,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Fiscal Year 2014: ¥910,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥210,000)
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
I examined the distribution of pseudogapping and VP-ellipsis in the history of English, i.e. from Old English to Present-day English, based on electronic corpora. The result shows that these elliptical constructions occur after pre-modals in Old English and Middle English. It is pointed out that the general assumption that pre-modals are not auxiliaries but lexical verbs is not compatible with the theoretical assumption that auxiliaries are responsible for the licensing of pseudogapping and VPE. This leads us to conclude that the pre-modals were already established as auxiliaries. Furthermore, this conclusion amounts to claim that English modals did not undergo the grammaticalization from lexical verbs to auxiliary verbs, whereas it has been widely assumed.
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