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

By: Castro-Chao, Noelia

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 303434189X
• ISBN13: 9783034341899
• Release Date: January 2021
• Publisher: Peter Lang Group Ag, International Academic P
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"