From ‘may’ to ‘must’ in late medieval Danish

Abstract

The paper investigates the meanings of the modal verb MA/MÅ in late Middle Danish, specifically the language at the time of the Reformation in the early 16th century. The goal is to identify the patterns of polysemy between different modal meanings (dynamic, permission, optative, etc.) and to identify the contexts where the change from dynamic possibility (‘can, may’) to dynamic necessity (‘must, have to’) happened. It is argued that this change occurred in contexts where open possibility was reinterpreted as inevitability, possibly through an intermediate stage of ‘prediction’. The development of MA/MÅ is compared to the history of English must and its West Germanic cognates.