Tracing processes in auxiliarization

This chapter considers the Norwegian verb rekke ('reach') and its English correspondences in a bi-directional translation corpus (ENPC), as well as occurrences of rekke in Norwegian monolingual corpora. We suggest that rekke is undergoing grammaticalization from a concrete lexical spatial verb towards a (semi-)auxiliary that contains a component of time sufficiency, similar to Swedish hinna (Johansson & Nordrum 2016), but that rekke is at an earlier stage in this development. We base this suggestion on the following observations: (1) Swedish hinna was earlier polysemous between space and time, but can only denote time in present-day Swedish. (2) Norwegian rekke is still polysemous between space and time, but seems to always denote time when used as a (semi-)auxiliary. The study contributes to the semantic description of Norwegian rekke, but also has implications for grammaticalization studies as well as for studies of modality. (Less)