Högskolan i Skövde

This thesis investigates the development of root and non-root meanings of modal verbs through an empirical study of the verbs må and kunna in Old Swedish. Modality is taken to refer domains in which possibility contrasts with necessity. In Old Swedish, må (magha) and kunna 'may' and kunna 'can' have the potential to express most of the meanings relating to possibility and necessity, as well as lexical meanings.

The two verbs are investigated in an Old Swedish corpus consisting of legal and religious texts. Certain default correlations between type of modal and semantic and syntatic enviroments, which have been proposed in the litterature, are investigated.

The result shows that må frequently expresses participant-internal possibility, 'ability' and deonic possibility, 'permission', whereas kunna is mainly associated with participant-internal and general external possibility. Of particular interest is the use of må in conditions, which provides evidence that this construction type may have played a bridging role in the development on non-root modality.

Using the framework of force dynamics, the development of modal meaning is analysed as a metamorphical transfer of one consistent image-schema between different conceptual domains. the schematic components are described in terms of forces and barriers. The proposed transfer from a physical to a social domain and further on to a mental and a conversional domain provides a good account of the diachronic development.