Let’s talk about uton

This paper discusses the form and behavior of Old English uton in relation to the question of whether it is a verb or not. Its lack of participation in the reduction process affecting finite verbs followed by wē and gē is difficult to account for if uton were still a verb form synchronically. The same holds for its apparently completely fixed syntactic position and the failure of the negative particle ne to attach to it. Not treating it as a verb would mean that uton constructions are without a finite verb, and it would make a very small number of examples hard to analyze but, on balance, the evidence suggests that uton had probably grammaticalized to a point where speakers no longer treated it as a verb.

• Affiliations: 1: The University of Edinburgh