Syntax of "behove" in Dan Michel's "Ayenbite of Inwit"

• Autores: Lucía Loureiro Porto
• Localización: Proceedings of the 30th International AEDEAN Conference: [electronic resource] / María Losada Friend (ed. lit.), Pilar Ron Vaz (ed. lit.), Sonia Hernández Santano (ed. lit.), Jorge Casanova García (ed. lit.), 2007, ISBN 978-84-96826-31-1
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Dan Michel's "Ayenbite of Inwi", representative of the Kentish dialect, shows interesting idiosyncratic features in the field of orthography and lexis which have been the subject of different studies (cf. Scahill 2002). The aim of this study is to check whether this text is also idiosyncratic from a syntactic point of view, since a preliminary overview of the text has revealed that Dan Michel has a strong preference for the verb bihoven (>PDE behove, see MED s.v. bihoven), which was quite a marginal verb, rather than for highly frequent verbs such as thurven, which was dominant in Old English (cf. Bosworth and Toller s.v. þurfan) or neden (>PDE need), which was incipiently gaining ground in Middle English. This paper analyses the contexts in which behove occurs and pays close attention to its syntactic function in order to check whether this verb exhibits auxiliary features, as OE þurfan and PDE need do at different points of history.