In this article, I relate the loss of weorðan in the past tense to the loss of an Old English grammatical subsystem that encouraged the expression of narrative by bounded sentence constructions. This type of construction represents a situation as reaching its goal or endpoint, and serves to mark progress in a narrative (e.g. then he walked over to the other side). Instead of this system, from Middle English onwards a mixed system emerges with differently structured bounded sentence constructions as well as, increasingly, unbounded sentence constructions – which structure events as open-ended, usually by means of a progressive form (e.g. he was walking). I show how weorðan in Old English was strongly associated with the Old English system of bounded sentence constructions – an association with boundedness is not surprising given its meaning of ‘(sudden) transition into another state’. In the thirteenth century this rigid Old English system started to break down, as primarily evidenced by the disappearance of the time adverbial þa and the loss of verb-second. Wearð, being strongly associated with the old way of structuring narrative, decreased too and eventually disappeared.

This four-volume publication is the second version, envisaged already at the planning of the project, of the monumental overview of World Englishes, first launched in 2004 as the two-volume Handbook of Varieties of English. The individual contributions, each covering the phonology or morphosyntax of a specific variety, are by and large identical in the 2004 and 2008 versions, but the overall structure is different: the more recent, ‘derived’ version is organized according to region, whereas the two 2004 volumes focused on worldwide phonology and morphosyntax respectively. Admittedly, the new version retains the same organization to a degree, in that each regional volume first features the phonology of all its varieties and then morphosyntax. In my view, this is a pity, as a coherent presentation of a variety would clearly have been more reader-friendly, but it would presumably have required a considerable amount of re-editing.