Development of Germanic analytical future tense forms: mechanism of oscillation asymptote equilibrium

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to reveal the mechanism of the future tense formation in the Germanic languages starting from the Gothic language as the oldest source of the Common Germanic grammatical peculiarities. The understanding and revealing of this mechanism include the first stage in which the initial and final analytical formants of the future tense are identified and distinguished. This stage presupposes the description of formants according to their morphological features as separate morphological units.

The second stage is connected with the semantic peculiarities when initial and final formants are understood as a common semantic unit that functions in a certain sentence context. Semantic properties and their variations are traces from one Germanic language to another and within one and the same Germanic language during its development – from the Old, Middle and to the New periods.

The subject of the research is peculiarities of the formation mechanism of temporal verb forms for projecting the action into the future. To describe the future action the Gothic language used analytical forms including initial formant containing inchoative or preterite-present verbs and final formant represented by the infinitive. Initial formants were the reflection of Greek or Latin lexical units with highly developed modal or inchoative meaning. It was the Gothic language that outlined the peculiarities of the analytical future tense formation, namely the process of oscillation within the initial formant between modal and inchoative lexical units. The oscillation could be recognized as unstable equilibrium taking into consideration the fading of Gothic which did not approach the stage of stable equilibrium between modal and inchoative lexical units.

If the Gothic language demonstrated only oscillation within the initial formant, other Germanic languages in the periods of Old and Middle developments demonstrated oscillation within the initial and final formants. There occurred the oscillation in Old High German and Middle High German in both formants in particular. Such oscillation disappeared in the 15th century. Another case of oscillation within the first formant was connected with two leading preterite-present (later modal) verbs with lexical meaning of obligation and volition. The New Frisian language demonstrates the extreme cases of the initial formant oscillation when only one modal verb is used excluding other modal and inchoative verbs. The detailed analysis of medieval Germanic texts demonstrated the facts of unstable equilibrium within the initial formant when modal verbs of obligation and volition were used. Such unstable equilibrium had the feature of asymptote indicating fluctuation, variation of modal verbs used for different persons. Asymptote demonstrates the fact of impossibility of getting stable equilibrium and modal verbs correlation within the initial formant. Instability of modal verbs makes the analytical future tense form more flexible and reliable for representing actions in future temporal projection. All these features make the analytical future tense form develop and be applied in different contextual cases of future temporal in all Germanic languages.