| Argument Structure in Flux: The Development of Impersonal Constructions in Middle and Early Modern English, with Special Reference to Verbs of Des Contributor(s): Gotti, Maurizio (Other), Castro-Chao, Noelia (Author) |
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ISBN: 303434189X ISBN-13: 9783034341899 Publisher: Peter Lang Group Ag, International Academic P OUR PRICE: $69.30 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 2021 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Language Arts & Disciplines | Linguistics - Syntax - Foreign Language Study |
| Physical Information: 0.67" H x 6" W x 9" (0.97 lbs) 300 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |