Abstract

In his interesting paper on babeo and aueo published in CQ 66 , 388–98, Dr. A.S. Gratwick raised a number of questions bearing on my own discussion of the origin and development of the babeo+infinitive construction in CQ 65 , 215–31. First the collapse of the earlier future-tense system. As I said, this was ‘the product of a number of different linguistic events’, phonetic, grammatical, and semantic, which were summarized and illustrated on pp. 220–1 of my paper. Even so Dr. Gratwick believes that I assigned too much weight to ‘phonetic attrition of the future simple’