ABSTRACT The present paper based on Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" offers a historical analysis of the semantic development of ME shulen with particular attention paid to the emergence of its future and epistemic senses. The study will juxtapose the analysis of OE sculan with ME shulen. In the drawn comparison, the paper will indicate that OE sculan was contextually contingent and constituted a structure, contrary to ME shulen which was contextually free. Moreover, the development of the ME sense of futurity when compared with the OE sense of prophecy, is to be viewed as the increase in the level of abstractness via defocusing of the divine conceptual subject.
