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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

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

Paperback

Series: Linguistic Insights, Book 274

GermanItalianLinguistics

ISBN10: 303434189X
ISBN13: 9783034341899
Publisher: Peter Lang Group Ag, International Academic P
Published: Jan 21 2021
Pages: 300
Weight: 0.97
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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.

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Gotti, Maurizio

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Linguistics