Changes in argument structure in Early Modern English with special reference to verbs of DESIREa case study of "lust"

  1. Noelia Castro-Chao 1
  1. 1 Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
    info

    Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

    Santiago de Compostela, España

    ROR https://ror.org/030eybx10

Revista:
Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL)

ISSN: 2243-4712

Ano de publicación: 2019

Número: 7

Páxinas: 129-154

Tipo: Artigo

DOI: 10.32714/RICL.07.07 SCOPUS: 2-s2.0-85099346471 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso aberto editor

Outras publicacións en: Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL)

Resumo

In Old and Middle English, several verbs of DESIRE could be found in impersonal constructions, a type of morphosyntactic pattern which lacks a subject marked for the nominative case controlling verbal agreement. The impersonal construction began to decrease in frequency between 1400 and 1500 (van der Gaaf 1904; Allen 1995), a development which has been recently investigated from the perspective of the interaction between impersonal verbs and constructional meaning by Trousdale (2008), Möhlig-Falke (2012) and Miura (2015). This paper is concerned specifically with the impersonal verb "lust" (< ME "lusten") as a representative of Levin’s (1993) class of verbs of DESIRE, some of which developed into prepositional verbs in Present-day English. The main aim here is to explore the changes undergone by "lust" during the two centuries after it ceases to appear in impersonal constructions, as well as to reflect upon some of the possible motivations for such changes. The data are retrieved from "Early English Books Online Corpus 1.0", a 525-million-word corpus, and the examples are analysed manually paying attention to the range of complementation patterns documented in Early Modern English (1500–1700).

€ Ver financiamento

Información de financiamento

For generous financial support, I am grateful to the following institutions: the Spanish Ministry of Education (grant FPU2014/03208), the European Regional Development Fund, the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (grant FFI2017-86884-P) and the Regional Government of Galicia (Directorate General for Scientific and Technological Promotion, grants ED431D 2017/09 and ED431B 2017/12).

Financiadores

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