Peculiarities of semantics development of the modal verb sollen in German

The category of modality belongs to the universal categories, because every language has it. It is so due to the fact that modal meanings are among the most important for every social environment, both in the cognitive and communicative aspects. That is why linguists of the past and linguists today do not disregard such complex language phenomenon as modality, because modal semantics and the means of its objectification do not remain unchanged and their changes correspond with the development of a society and its needs. In its turn, this fact determines the wide variety of modal semantics. Most importantly, the semantics of the modal verbs, the research of which is still topical in the modern-day linguistics. The German modal verbs occupy a special place among the modal verbs of the other Germanic languages, not only due to their quantitative superiority, but also because of the wide variety of the expressed meanings, both in internal and subjective external modalities. The verb sollen plays one of the leading roles as means of verbalization of these types of modality in the modern German system of modal verbs. This fact is the reason why the verb sollen was chosen to be the object of the study. The analysis of the scientific literature given in this article dedicated to the German modal verbs showed lack of works in the modern German studies on this topic, that were not only descriptive, but the ones that possessed explanatory nature and that would show the development of the modal verbs as a unified process of changing the semantics of the preterite-present verbs into the internal modality. That is why the aim of the article is to explain the peculiarities of the modal semantics origination of the verb sollen from the early stages of its development. The article is also aimed to show the specifics in the semantic changes mechanics, occurring in the process of transformation of this verb from a preterite-present into a modal one. A contextual analysis of the selected examples of the verb sollen usage from the written sources of the Gothic, Old-, Middle-, Early New- and New High German was conducted in order to achieve this aim. The analysis was followed by the semantic interpretation and the comparison of the identified meanings of this verb in the different historical periods of the German language. This allowed to show the peculiarities of the semantic changes of this verb in course of all stages of its development and to determine the main trends in these changes. The first trend reflects the line of transforming the verb sollen from preterite-present into modal and the verbalization development of different shades of the internal modality. In this case, the essential mechanism of the change from the original semantics into the semantics of internal modality was the context-induced reinterpretation. It is characterized by the gradual influence of the corresponding context on the secondary meaning of a lexeme under study. Schematically it might be represented as follows: initial context > bridging context > switch context > expansion of the number of the contexts and the number of the lexemes, which collocate with the verb sollen in its new meaning respectively. The second trend shows the change of the modal semantics of the verb sollen into the line of subjective external modality, the research of which is relevant in the modern-day German studies and that raises a number of questions to be resolved in the future for the authors of the article.

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