Diachronie der Zukunft

Abstract Based on the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) and the Bonn Early New High German Corpus (FnhdC), this paper investigates the development of the German future construction werden + Infinitive as well as constructions that are often seen as its predecessors and/or competitors. The paper focuses on the construction werden + Present Participle but also takes modal verb constructions with mögen, müssen, sollen, and wollen into account. A semantic analysis of the dependent verbs occurring in the constructions with regard to their aspectual characteristics reveals that werden + Infinitive and werden + Present Participle undergo parallel developments that can be seen as context expansion from a grammaticalization-theoretical perspective. The modal verb constructions, by contrast, remain stable with regard to the aspectual semantics of their dependent verbs. Furthermore, it is argued that, following recent theoretical approaches from diachronic Construction Grammar, the complex relationship between werden + Infinitive and werden + Participle can be modelled as ›attraction‹ or contamination between different constructions.