On Want to: A Grammaticalization Perspective

초록

This study aims to address the recent development of want to, which derived from the desiderative verb want. It has been treated both as a main verb by Quirk at al. (1985) and as an emerging quasi-modal by Bolinger (1980) and Krug (2000). Krug (2000) conducted an in-depth study on want to from OE to the 1990s with the assistance of copora. This study builds on the work of Krug (2000), showing the recent trend and changes of want to in morpho-syntax and semantic extension with corpora data from the 1810s to the 2010s from the COHA and the COCA. This study will provide the experiential evidence to indicate that want to has gradually evolved to the functional and modal auxiliariness on the scale. This paper will fill the gap between Krug (2000) and future research on want to.

키워드