The shift from ‘remain’ to ‘become’

Abstract This article traces the semantic shift of the Danish blive and Swedish bliva from ‘remain’ to ‘become’, drawing on corpus data from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Within the framework of the Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change ( iitsc ), the study argues that the shift was driven by pragmatic re-interpretation in syntactically ambiguous contexts, particularly copular constructions with adjectival or participial complements. Whilst language contact with Middle Low German and the decline of the verb varde/varda created favourable conditions, they were not sufficient triggers. Instead, it was the interpretative overlap between persistence and change that enabled re-analysis. The article also shows how this semantic development paved the way for grammaticalisation, as blive/bliva evolved into passive auxiliaries. The findings contribute to broader typological discussions on semantic duality in verbs meaning ‘remain’ and ‘become’.