The unfinished cline of grammaticalisation? Reflections on the uses of OE under and its derivatives

Abstract

A lexical category under functioned in Old English as a preposition, an adverb or a member of a compound. This raises the questions: of whether and, if so, to what extent did these different uses undergo a process of grammaticalisation? On the basis of the observations of language material I assume that the cline of changes has never reached a final stage and either the process has been interrupted or is still in the making, which requires a fundamental rethink of the problem.