Abstract :
The evolution of verbs expressing necessity in the history of English, such as ∗þurfan
and need, has been studied in detail, especially their semantic competition and their
grammaticalization (see Molencki 2002, 2005; Taeymans 2006; Loureiro-Porto 2009).
However, analogous verbo-nominal expressions involving the morphologically related
nouns þearf and need and the verbs be and have have received little attention, despite their
relevance as semantic competitors of the verbs and their subsequent fossilization in highfrequency
expressions such as if need be and had need. The current article fills this gap by
studying the development of verbo-nominal expressions with þearf and need from Old to
early Modern English, and asks: (i) whether the verbs and the verbo-nominal expressions
undergo similar processes of grammaticalization, and (ii) whether there is any connection
between the evolution of the verbal and the verbo-nominal sets. Analysis of these verbonominal
constructions in a 4.1 million-word corpus (including the Helsinki Corpus and
fragments of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the Corpus of Middle English Prose
and Verse, the Lampeter Corpus and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence
Sampler) shows that, firstly, both idiomaticization and grammaticalization are relevant
in the development of verbo-nominal constructions; secondly, their evolution is key to the
understanding of the development of the necessity verbs ∗þurfan and need; and finally, the
competition between constructions with þearf and need calls into question the well-known
hypothesis that phonological confusion with durran caused the disappearance of ∗þurfan
in the ME period (see Visser 1963–73: 1423, §1343).
