>You've established the first stage. What's your example for the
>second stage? Semantically, I can see an intermediate stage as a
>verb of location, "There's the wolf on the hill" => "The wolf is on
>the hill", but are there any examples of even that change?
Actually, at this point, I'm saying that the change involved the
growing dependance on *es- in what were originally verbless
sentences. Basically the pattern of S-O-ZERO came to be too
awkward and it ached for a verb. It's similar to how IE used
to not need *ego: with a verb, because it was sufficient to
convey 1ps without (via the verb), yet now /I/ has become
a necessary feature of English (at least standard English, anyway).
So originally both "be" and "have" didn't exist, although a
verb might be found to provide emphasis of the state. Then
*es- came to be used to fill in the verbless void, but it still,
as I suggested with an example, could convey both verbs
up to IE itself. Not much of semantic leap, really.
Yet *esmi ended up meaning strictly "I am" not "I have"
because of the use of *es- in equational sentences. Instead
of thinking of */kwo:ns wlkWos esti/ as "the dog is a wolf",
think of it as "there is the dog that is a wolf" or in French
"il y a le chien qui est le loup." This is what I'm saying
about "marked" sentences. The unmarked sentence
(without *es-) in MIE meant "X is X" while *es- marked
the general existence of something as something else.
It mgiht be that *es- was originally _only_ for 3ps and
then spread to all persons with the specific meaning of
"to be" based on the "there is" usage.
= gLeN
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