From motion to possibility. Latin (ne)queo ‘I can(not)’ in the light of philological and typological data

This paper suggests a new account of the origin of the Latin modal constructions featuring the verbs nequeo 'I cannot' and queo 'I can' from eo 'to go, to come'. The traditional etymology claims that nequeo and queo developed from an impersonal form (ne)quit(ur) 'it does (not) go' into fully-fledged personal verbs. An in-depth analysis of the Early Latin corpus clearly shows that, when it is possible to verify whether there is a syntactic subject or not, nequeo and queo are always used personally. They convey almost exclusively dynamic modality, mainly participant-related possibility. Importantly, the Latin data fit present-day typological knowledge about the development of participant-related possibility modality from verbs of motion in specific constructions. This study contributes not only to the reconstruction of the early history of Latin (ne)queo, but also to the general discussion about the emergence of modality from motion constructions.