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Argument Structure in Flux
The Development of Impersonal Constructions in Middle and Early Modern English, with Special Reference to Verbs of Desire
Noelia Castro-Chao
- 300 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Argument Structure in Flux
The Development of Impersonal Constructions in Middle and Early Modern English, with Special Reference to Verbs of Desire
Noelia Castro-Chao
About This Book
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 (1470sâ1690s). 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.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Copyright information
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The function and development of English impersonal constructions
- 3 The nature of verb meaning and constructional meaning
- 4 The class of verbs of Desire
- 5 Data and methodology
- 6 ï»żLustï»ż
- 7 ï»żThirstï»ż
- 8 ï»żLongï»ż
- 9. Discussion and conclusions
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Appendix I. . List of selected texts from EEBOCorp 1..0:Subperiod 1 (1500â1549)
- Appendix II. . List of selected texts from EEBOCorp 1..0:Subperiod 2 (1550â1599)
- Appendix III. . List of selected texts from EEBOCorp 1..0:Subperiod 3 (1600â1649)
- Appendix IV. . List of selected texts from EEBOCorp 1..0:Subperiod 4 (1650â1700)
- References
- Index
- Series index