The Dutch modals, a paradigm?

This paper addresses the question how to define the notion of a "paradigm", as a cognitively real phenomenon. The discussion is based on the case of a set of forms from a linguistic class that is not part of the traditional domain of "paradigmhood" (i.e. inflectional morphology): the modal auxiliaries in Dutch. The paper presents the results of a few studies into the diachronic evolution of these forms, grammatically and semantically, showing how a subset of them has gradually accumulated shared features and developed an internal division of labor, thus displaying active group behavior.