Permission in affirmative and interrogative clauses

meaning of permission is aptly shown through the following examples:

(3.4.8) bebead him, ðus cweðende: Of ælcum treowe ðises ordered him thus saying: from each tree of-this

orcerdes ðu most etan.

orchard thou must eat

‘(He) ordered him thus saying: ‘You may eat from every tree in this orchard.’’

(COOTEST 2.16) (3.4.9) 7 þus cwæð: Min fæder, mot ic þe ohtes ahsian.

and thus said: My father, must I thee anything ask

‘and thus said, ‘My father, may I ask you something? ’’

(COBEDE 3.266.22) (3.4.10) Borges mon mot oðsacan, gif he wat, þæt Guarantee-of-security man may deny, if he knows, that he ryht deð.

he right does

‘One may deny the guarantee of security provided that he is certain that it is lawful.’

(COLAW2 41) (3.4.11) Be oxanhyrde: ... 7 his metecu mot gan mid hlafordes on ox shepherd and his cow must go with master’s heorde

herd

‘Concerning ox shepherds: ... and his cow may go along with the master’s herd.’

(COLAW4 12) (3.4.12) Se bisceop þa moste under Moyses æ habban wif and the bishop then must under Moses’ law have wife and cild for þære gesetnysse

child for that tradition

‘According to Moses’s law, a bishop could have a wife and child on account of the tradition.’

(COAELET3 76) (3.4.13) We sceolon (...) leahtras and unlustas forseon, þæt we we shall vices and evil-pleasures reject, that we heofena rice habban motan.

heaven kingdom have must

‘We should reject vices and evil pleasures so that we could have the heavenly kingdom.’

(COAELET3 22) As can be noticed, the above examples are arranged so as to reflect a cline extending from the most subjective and modally strongest examples to the least

subjective and modally weakest ones. Without a doubt, the cline brings to mind comparisons with the clines of deontic necessity. Although most of such comparisons are in essence justifiable, there emerges one pivotal difference.

The very force of deontic necessity, when distilled to the bare essentials by disregarding subjectivity-inducing parameters such as the speaker’s authority, speaker’s involvement, etc., varies from context to context ranging from very strong, almost order-like among the core examples of sceal+infinitive, e.g.

example (3.3.11) to weaker, advice-like among the skirt/peripheral examples of agan (to) infinitive, e.g. (3.1.16). In other words, the force imposed by the Antagonist upon the Agonist in a deontic necessity scenario is gradable, some deontic necessity examples require translation along the lines of ‘it is obligatory/absolutely essential that’ and some other prefer an ‘it is important that’ gloss. The force of permission per se is not a gradient. A common denominator in all permission examples is that, as COATES (1983: 87) notes speaking of PDE can, they “can be paraphrased with the words ‘permitted’ or

‘allowed.’” This constraint on permission becomes self-evident when one resorts to SWEETSER’S (1990) comments on the force-and-barrier nature of permission. Permission-granting means withdrawing a barrier which would otherwise thwart the Agonist’s actions. Were the Antagonist to restore the barrier back to place, we would have to do with a proper case of prohibition.

Indeed, it is hardly conceivable that the situation admits any options in between in the shape of, say, a barrier partly lifted (for similar considerations concerning Present-Day English, see MATTHEWS 1991: 112—113).

Thus if it is not the force of permission that can be held responsible for the existence of the cline of permission, some other factors must be considered in an attempt to account for this cline. The position atop the cline of (3.4.8) and (3.4.9) is guaranteed by their directive character in the sense of LYONS (1977).

They are both directive in that (3.4.8) carries the speaker’s permission and (3.4.9) is a request for the hearer’s permission. (3.4.8) approaches an epitome of a permission-granting directive as the subject is directly addressed in the second person, the speaker (God) is endowed with authority and cannot be suspected of lack of involvement. Nor can the speaker in (3.4.9) be assumed to fail to acknowledge the hearer’s authority. Both examples figure high on a scale of subjectivity, too. Considering that there are only three such directives in my sample, including two interrogative clauses, it could be argued that they are only used in prescribed contexts involving participants of significantly different status in a society, family, etc. (see WARNER 1993: 164—165 for similar examples). Examples (3.4.10) through (3.4.12) represent what LYONS

(1977) calls deontic statements to the extent that the speaker in each of them seeks to report on the validity of permission issued by someone else. In (3.4.10) and (3.4.11) the state of permission exists in the present and originates in legal regulations, hence little, if any, involvement of the speaker. As with the

cases of deontic necessity inspired by some legal body, the subject, when Agonist, is often generic. The same can be said of (3.4.12), in which the permission is clearly indicated as holding under specific circumstances in the past. The source of this permission is the law of Moses, that is to say, an interface of legal and religious norms, which is index to those two sources constituting major guidelines for the generation of permission and deontic necessity in the OE texts. It is also worthy of note that mot with the sense of permission is on familiar terms with wide scope, consider the instance of the verb in (3.4.11), where the subject is not exactly the addressee of the permission, the Agonist being demoted. Another point of interest is that mot clearly favors main verb complements which prototypically stand for activities and call for an agent. The type of permission granted via mot usually refers to dynamic actions to be performed by willful agents, as illustrated in examples (3.4.8) through (3.4.11). As evidenced in Table 22, the trend continues unabated regardless of the meaning that the verb goes with.

In example (3.4.13) we witness the use of mot in a subordinate clause, a sort of environment where the meaning of permission is more likely to be on the wane. In this particular case, mot comes in a future oriented purpose clause which has a permission reading tainted with an overtone of a wish. GOOSSENS

(1987b: 231) is far from bewildered by such overtones when he remarks that

“permissions have a natural link with wishes in that whatever one is permitted is to be consonant with one’s wishes (giving a permission removes an obstruction for an activity which the permissee wants to carry out/be involved in, etc.).” The occurrence of mot in purpose clauses correlates with the integration of the verb into the structure of periphrastic subjunctive. Again, GOOSSENS (1987b: 232) notes that, despite the apparent indicative mood in (3.4.13), by the time of Ælfric the distinction between plural indicative and subjunctive forms falls by the wayside so that the indicative form, in fact,

Complement

Meaning Activity verb Non-activity verb Passive structure Total Permission/prohibition 105 Table 22.Distribution of infinitival complements with mot

signals a subjunctive structure. By the same token, as mot joins the ranks of subjunctive markers along with sceolde (cf. 3.4.3) and mæg (cf. KRZYSZPIEŃ’S

1980), a permission reading becomes less salient in favor of the grammatical function.

Purpose clauses aside, mot with a weakened idea of permission can be traced to situations where the meaning of the verb depends for its relevance on a preceding expression from which a sense of permission can also be derived.

Similar cases embracing sceolde are recognized and reviewed in 3.3.5 under the heading redundant modality (cf. PLANK 1984). GOOSSENS (1987b: 230), while focusing on some of such examples, adds a syntactic dimension by stating that we have to do with “a semantic weakening [of permission — J.N.]

owing to the (syntactic) embedding after a verb of a particular (semantic) class.” What he means are sentences of the following type:

(3.4.14) On ðam ilcan steode þe God him geuðe þæt he moste On the same place where God him granted that he must Engleland gegan.

England subdue

‘On that same spot where God granted him that he should/might gain England,’

(COCHROE4 1086.72) Syntactically, þæt he moste Engleland gegan is a direct object of the verb geunnan ‘to grant’ in the matrix clause. At the root of the semantics of geunnan is the satisfaction of the indirect object’s, i.e. him, wish and if the wish happens to be an action, then to answer this wish is to grant permission to act. Thus there are strong grounds for arguing that a verb such as geunnan opens up a possibility of a permission reading, which renders the occurrence of mot in the subordinate clause somehow excessive. Witness also that the notion of attempting to satisfy the indirect object’s wish encoded in geunnan rules out deontic necessity as the meaning of mot. Other main clause verbs which have mot ensuing in the subordinate clause in my sample are: biddan (‘to ask’ four times), geþafian (‘to grant’ two times), onfon (‘to receive’ two times), gildan (‘to grant’ one time), wilnian (‘to long for’ one time) and forgiefan (‘to give’

one time). As regards such structures, it is vital to notice that a sequence of a permission expression followed by mot may extend beyond a matrix clause-embedded clause configuration. I find one interesting instance:

(3.4.15) ðeah be ðæs apostoles leafe læwede man though according-to the apostle’s permission lay man mot for neode oðre siðe wifian.

must for need other time take-wife

‘Though in accordance with the apostle’s permission, a layman may marry again if he needs to.’

(COINSPOL 190) where the permission of mot stems from the idea of permission explicitly present in the noun leaf ‘permission, license.’ From a semantic perspective, there is no deviation from the already observed formula in that the meaning of mot builds upon that of a preceding element, viz. leaf. Syntactically, however, mot belongs to the VP, a structurally higher constituent than the adjunct adverbial containing leaf.

3.4.3.2. Prohibition