A Diachronic Syntactic Study on the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus—Focusing on Tense, Aspect, and Modality

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper is designed to show the diachronic syntactic changes from Old English (OE) to Present-day English (PE), taking the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) as a specific illustrative example. The focus is on tense, aspect, and modality; It is described and explained how the tense, aspect, and modality of OE changed to those of PE through Middle English (ME) and Early Modern English (ENE). Concerning the changes of the tense, aspect, and modality of the English language from OE through ME and ENE to PE, these are characterized as the changes from contextualization to decontextualization. For example, the OE sentence We doþ ealle Drihtnes word, þe he spræc (Exodus 24:3) is literally translated as ‘we do all the Lord’s words which he spoke.’ This word-for-word translation corresponds to the PE sentence We will do all the words which the LORD has spoken! In OE the meaning of the simple present was determined as being either the simple present tense or the future depending on context, this being the result of contextualization (disambiguation strategy by context). However, in PE the simple present and future tense are differentiated in form, as shown above for PE sentence; this results from the process of decontextualization.