Publisher's Synopsis
The Germanic languages from Gothic, Old Norse and Old Saxon to modern Dutch, English and German are the source of data for this collection of articles on diachronic verbal morphology. Central questions are the origins of strong and weak verbs, the development of tense, aspect and mood categories, and both their formal morphological or syntactic marking, and their implications for the semantics of the verb phrase. The articles are all theoretically informed, albeit from a wide range of frameworks, and issues of reconstruction, typology and analogy are discussed alongside grammaticalization, ergativity and polarity in order to shed new light on the diverse forms and functions of the Germanic verb.
