“Let mee bee so bold to request you to tell mee”

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kohnen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of

Constructions with let me (e.g. let me see, let me tell you, let me think what to do next) are usually analysed as so-called periphrastic imperatives. This paper shows that most of the examples found in Middle English and Early Modern English corpora cannot be understood in this sense but must be seen as constructions with the full verb let with the meaning “permit” or “cause”. While these constructions are still imperatives and in most cases directives, they are different in that they are focused on the addressee and — apparently — on the addressee’s approval. The paper traces the spread of these let-me constructions, their functions as strategies of politeness and their relationship to other so-called indirect directives in the history of English.

scholarly journals The Grammaticalization of the Epistemic Adverb Perhaps in Late Middle and Early Modern English

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafał Molencki
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old French ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
Prepositional Phrases ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of

Abstract Old and Early Middle English did not yet have modal sentential adverbs of low probability. Old Norse did not have such words, either. From the 13th century onwards first epistemic prepositional phrases of Anglo-Norman origin functioning as modal adverbials consisting of the preposition per/par and nouns such as adventure, case, chance were borrowed into Middle English. In the late 15th century an analogous hybrid form per-hap(s), the combination of the Old French preposition per/par ‘by, through’ and the Old Norse noun hap(p) ‘chance’, both singular and plural, was coined according to the same pattern and was gradually grammaticalized as a univerbated modal sentence adverb in Early Modern English. The Norse root happ- was the source of some other new (Late) Middle English words which had no cognate equivalents in the source language: the adjective happy with its derivatives happily, happiness, etc. and the verb happen. Together with another new Late Middle English formation may-be, a calque of French peutêtre, perhaps superseded the competing forms mayhap, (modal) happily, percase, peradventure, perchance, prepositional phrases with the noun hap and, finally, per-hap itself in Early Modern English after two centuries of lexical layering or multiple synonymy. The history of perhaps is a clear example of grammaticalization, whereby a prepositional phrase became a modal adverb now also used as a discourse marker. We find here all the typical features of the process: phonetic attrition, decategorization, univerbation, and obligatorification.

scholarly journals Negative inversion, negative concord and sentential negation in the history of English

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILLIP WALLAGE
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Sentential Negation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Minimalist Framework ◽  
The Way ◽  
English I

It is claimed in van Kemenade (2000: 62) that clauses with initial negative constituents are a context in which subject–verb inversion occurs throughout the history of English. However, different patterns of negative inversion are seen at different periods of English. I argue that changes in the availability of negative inversion reflect changes in the way sentential scope for negation is marked in negative concord constructions. Thus, negative concord involving Middle and Early Modern English not does not co-occur with negative inversion, but negative concord involving Middle English ne does. Changes to negative inversion can be seen to parallel changes in the way sentential scope negation is expressed at successive stages of the Middle English Jespersen Cycle. I propose that the changes to negative inversion and Jespersen's Cycle should both be analysed as changes in the ability of negative items to mark sentential scope for negation. This observation can be formalised within a Minimalist framework as variation in the LF-interpretability of negative features, following the account of Jespersen's Cycle proposed by Wallage (2008).

The intertwining of differentiation and attraction as exemplified by the history of recipient transfer and benefactive alternations

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-578
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of

AbstractDe Smet et al. (2018) propose that when functionally similar constructions come to overlap, analogical attraction may occur. So may differentiation, but this process involves attraction to other subnetworks and is both “accidental” and “exceptional”. I argue that differentiation plays a considerably more significant role than De Smet et al. allow. My case study is the development of the dative and benefactive alternations. The rise of the dative alternation (e.g., “gave the Saxons land” ∼ “gave land to the Saxons”) has been shown to occur in later Middle English between 1400 and 1500 (Zehentner 2018). Building on Zehentner and Traugott (2020), the rise of the benefactive alternation (e.g., “build her a house” ∼ “build a house for her”) in Early Modern English c1650 is analyzed from a historical constructionalist perspective and compared with the rise of the dative alternation. The histories of the alternations exemplify the rise of functionally similar constructions that overlap, and show that differentiation from each other plays as large a role as attraction. Both attraction and differentiation occur at several levels of abstraction: verb-specific constructions, schemas and larger systemic changes.

The discourse markerwellin the history of English

1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas H. Jucker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Partial Answer ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Face Threat ◽  
Interpersonal Level

The discourse markerwellhas four distinct uses in Modern English: as a frame it introduces a new topic or prefaces direct reported speech; as a qualifier it prefaces a reply which is only a partial answer to a question; as a face-threat mitigator it prefaces a disagreement; and as a pause filler it bridges interactional silence.In Old Englishwellwas used on an interpersonal level as an emphatic attention-getting device (similar to Old Englishhwæt‘listen’, ‘behold’, or ‘what’). In Middle English,wellalways functioned as a frame on a textual level. In Early Modern English, and particularly in the plays by Shakespeare, the uses ofwelldiversified considerably and adopted interpersonal uses again.

scholarly journals Intensificatory Tautology in the History of English: A Corpus-based Study

2021 ◽  
pp. 007542422199909
Author(s):  
Victorina González-Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Structural Reorganization ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Noun

This paper explores the development and establishment of intensificatory tautology (specifically, size-adjective clusters, e.g., “ great big plans,” “ little tiny room”) in the history of English. The analysis suggests that size-adjective clusters appear in the Late Middle English period as a result of the functional-structural reorganization of the English noun phrase. It is only towards the end of the Early Modern English period that they start to become (relatively) productive in the language, and in Present-Day English that they acquire a wide(r) intensifying functional range (i.e., adjective modifier, emphasizer, degree intensifier) and become associated with informal, spoken-based registers. More broadly, the paper suggests that more research is needed as regards the role of collocation in processes of intensifier creation in the noun phrase and, more generally, as regards how collocation interacts with word-formation processes in this context.

scholarly journals Word-entries and Big Data in Lexicons of Early Modern English

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-234
Author(s):  
Ian Lancashire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Online Database ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Survival And Growth ◽  
The University

This brief thirty-year history of Lexicons of Early Modern English, an online database of glossaries and dictionaries of the period, begins in a fourteenth-floor Robarts Library lab of the Centre for Computing and the Humanities at the University of Toronto in 1986. It was first published freely online in 1996 as the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database. Ten years later, in a seventh-floor lab also in the Robarts Library, it came out as LEME, thanks to support from TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) and the University of Toronto Press and Library. No other modern language has such a resource. The most important reason for the emergence, survival, and growth of LEME is that its contemporary lexicographers understood their language differently from how we, our many advantages notwithstanding, have conceived it over the past two centuries. Cette brève histoire des trente ans du Lexicons of Early Modern English, une base de données en ligne de glossaires et de dictionnaires de l’époque, commence en 1986 dans le laboratoire du Centre for Computing and the Humanities, au quatorzième étage de la bibliothèque Robarts de l’Université de Toronto. Cette base de données a été publiée gratuitement en ligne premièrement en 1996, sous le titre Early Modern English Dictionnaires Database. Dix ans plus tard, elle était publiée sous le sigle LEME, à partir du septième étage de la même bibliothèque Robarts, grâce au soutien du TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research), de la bibliothèque et des presses de l’Université de Toronto. Aucune autre langue vivante ne dispose d’une telle ressource. La principale raison expliquant l’émergence, la survie et la croissance du LEME est que les lexicographes qui font l’objet du LEME comprenaient leur langue très différemment que nous la concevons depuis deux siècles, et ce nonobstant plusieurs de nos avantages.

Constraints on ellipsis alternation: A view from the history of English

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Nykiel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Form Processing ◽  
Argument Ellipsis ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Construction Type ◽  
Semantic Dependencies ◽  
Late Modern

AbstractI offer a diachronic perspective on English ellipsis alternation, or the alternation between inclusion and omission of prepositions from remnants under sluicing and bare argument ellipsis. The relative freedom to omit prepositions from remnants has not been stable in English; this freedom is connected to the strength of semantic dependencies between prepositions and verbs. Remnants without prepositions are first attested, but remain less frequent than remnants with prepositions, as late as Early Modern English and gain in frequency following this period. I demonstrate that three constraints—correlate informativity, structural persistence, and construction type—predict ellipsis alternation in Early and Late Modern English. However, predicting ellipsis alternation in present-day English requires semantic dependencies in addition to the three constraints. The constraints can be subsumed under principles of language processing and production (considerations of accessibility, a tendency to reuse structure, and a conventionalized performance preference for efficiently accessing constituents that form processing domains), permitting a unified processing account of ellipsis alternation with cross-linguistic coverage.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Lilo Moessner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Computational Analysis ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Present Book ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Periods

This chapter sets the present book off against previous studies about the English subjunctive in the historical periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE). The aim of the book is described as the first comprehensive and consistent description of the history of the present English subjunctive. The key term subjunctive is defined as a realisation of the grammatical category mood and an expression of the semantic/pragmatic category root modality. The corpus used in the book is part of The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, comprising nearly half a million words in 91 files. The research method adopted is a combination of close reading and computational analysis.

From ‘quickly’ to ‘fairly’: on the history ofrather

2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTI RISSANEN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Type I ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Semantic Development ◽  
Syntactic Development

In this article I describe the semantic and syntactic development of the moderatorratherfrom Old to Present-day English using a variationist approach.Ratheroriginates in an Old English comparative adverb indicating speed, and hence time, but the loss of the indication of speed and movement can already be traced in the Old English period. In Middle English the ‘preferential’ senses ofrather(e.g. the type ‘I would rather do X than Y’) become more common than the temporal senses. This contrastive meaning constitutes the unmarked use ofratherin Early Modern English, but it gradually weakens in the course of the Modern English period. The moderator use becomes popular in the second half of the eighteenth century. The semantic development outlined above goes hand in hand with a syntactic development from an original adjunct into a subjunct and conjunct, and finally into a modifier of adjectives and adverbs.

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