Argument Structure in Flux: The Development of Impersonal Constructions in Middle and Early Modern English, with Special Reference to Verbs of Desire

by Noelia Castro-Chao, Maurizio Gotti (Editor)

Overview

The class of verbs of Desire comprises verbs whose syntax and semantics have undergone important changes in the course of their histories. Their argument structure involves a Desirer and a Desired, and in earlier English they could be used impersonally in constructions lacking a subject marked for the nominative case. The book presents three case studies based on a comprehensive survey of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary and on corpus data retrieved from EEBOCorp 1.0 (1470s–1690s). The results obtained unveil the loss of impersonal uses and their gradual replacement by personal patterns, in particular a pattern where the verb governs a prepositional complement representing the Desired as a metaphorical goal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783034341899
Publisher:	Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Publication date:	01/21/2021
Series:	Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication , #274
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.86(h) x (d)

About the Author

Noelia Castro-Chao holds a PhD in English linguistics from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Her research interests include historical syntax and semantics, corpus linguistics, and construction grammar.

Table of Contents

Introduction - The function and development of English impersonal constructions - The nature of verb meaning and constructional meaning - The class of verbs of Desire - Data and methodology - Lust - Thirst - Long