Chapter 8. Prepositions in Early Modern English argument structure and beyond

2022 ◽  
pp. 202-224
Author(s):  
Eva Zehentner ◽  
Marianne Hundt
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Early Modern English

scholarly journals THE FORMATION OF RAISING VERB ARGUMENT STRUCTURE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH

2018 ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
M. Polkhovska ◽  
A. Ochkovska
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
English Language ◽  
Transitive Verb ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Verb Argument Structure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Theta Role ◽  
Subject Raising

The paper is focused on studying the formation process of the argument structure of the raising verbs and, as a consequence, the establishment of the subject raising construction in the Early Modern English language. The emergence of studied verbs in the history of English is associated with the process of grammaticalization, when a verb with a full argument structure turns into a raising one-argument non-transitive verb that has no external argument and does not assign any theta-role to its internal argument; and subjectification, during which we observe the transition from the concrete semantic meaning of the verb to the abstract one. Restructuring of the argument environment of the raising verb is caused by the semantic bleaching of its meaning; as a result the Agent and the Cause are combined at the semantic structure level in the process of detransitivation. The Early Modern raising verb is a semantic and syntactic nucleus of the subject raising construction, which determines its main peculiarities.

scholarly journals Changes in argument structure in Early Modern English with special reference to verbs of DESIRE: A case study of lust

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 129-154
Author(s):  
Noelia Castro-Chao
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Nominative Case ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
Early English

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).

Discovering Architecture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Walker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Ancient Athens ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Degree Of Confidence ◽  
Architectural Principles ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Architectural Knowledge

This chapter deals with the genesis of architectural knowledge. In particular, it explores those rare moments when early modern English authors wrote about newly discovered examples of ancient architecture, the most important forms of architectural knowledge that existed. I will discuss three such accounts (all published in the Philosophical Transactions) of Roman York, Palmyra, and ancient Athens. These three texts share a preoccupation with truth and accuracy, as befitted the task of communicating highly sought-after architectural knowledge. They also demonstrate the degree of confidence of English writers in this period, not only in how they interpreted ancient architecture, but also in how they sought to criticize previous European authors on the subject. But most importantly, these texts reveal the extent of English intellectuals’ knowledge of the architectural principles of the ancient world and how that knowledge was in a state of flux.

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