Auxiliaries in Old Dutch

Abstract This study explores the use of auxiliaries in the oldest text available for Old Dutch, the Wachtendonck Psalter, dating from the 10th century. Our aim is to understand why there are so few different auxiliaries in this text in comparison to other texts in Old Dutch. We tackle this question by taking a historical comparative perspective, using methodological insights and techniques from corpus-based contrastive linguistics and typology. More specifically, we build a diachronic parallel corpus of psalm translations and compare the contexts in which auxiliaries and inflectional alternatives are used in these parallel texts by means of multidimensional scaling. Our historical comparative method results in five proximity maps which allow us to explore and compare the inventory of verb constructions of the Wachtendonck Psalter both retrospectively, with its source text in Latin, and prospectively, with later translations in Dutch. Our analysis examines the role of grammaticalization as well as the specific nature of the text as an interlinear translation as possible motivations for the presence and absence of auxiliaries in the Wachtendonck Psalter.