Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2021 / The Development of long in Early Modern English: Impersonal Verbs of Desire in Focus

The Development of long in Early Modern English: Impersonal Verbs of Desire in Focus

Paper · 2021 · Noelia Castro-Chao

Summary

This article tracks how the English verb long (from OE langian), a verb of Desire in Levin's (1993) classification, changed its argument structure during Early Modern English. Older English allowed it in impersonal clauses with no grammatical subject, where the desiring person (Experiencer) appeared in objective case. Later it settled into personal patterns, mainly prepositional ones such as long for. The study has three aims: to date when the impersonal use ended, to chart which personal patterns took its place, and to explain the rise of prepositional long within Construction Grammar. The author first reviews the senses and syntax recorded in the OED and MED. She then annotates 341 tokens of the verb drawn from a random prose subcorpus of EEBOCorp 1.0 covering 1500–1700. Her hypothesis is that prepositional long is a new form-meaning pairing, a metaphorical offshoot of the intransitive motion construction in which the desired thing is treated as a Goal. The supplied text leaves out the detailed results. The work fills a gap that Miura identified: corpus-based evidence on how individual impersonal verbs diverged after the construction collapsed.

Key points

  • Source corpus: EEBOCorp 1.0 (Petré 2013), about 525 million words. A random subset of 891 prose texts (19,934,284 words) was split into four fifty-year subperiods, S1 (1500–1549) to S4 (1650–1700), each close to 5 million words.
  • The dataset contains 341 occurrences of the verb long. Each was annotated for clause type, subperiod and subject domain.
  • To find spelling variants, the author took the OED's variant list and checked it against an AntConc word list built from the corpus.
  • "Impersonal" is defined narrowly, following Möhlig-Falke: only clauses with no grammatical subject at all count. Clauses with a dummy it, like "it snows", are excluded.
  • According to dictionaries and earlier studies, impersonal long is attested from OE up to roughly the first half of the 16th century. Only the OED sense branch for emotional or physical desire is analysed, using the semantic frame <Desirer Desired>.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Sampling a manageable random subcorpus keeps manual homonym disambiguation feasible: here, verb long versus the adjective and adverb. Searching the whole corpus would produce far too many hits to check by hand.
  • I2. Spelling variants are collected by starting from a dictionary's list and keeping only the forms that actually occur in the corpus word list.
  • I3. The Experiencer role stays the same whether it appears as the subject or as an oblique objective pronoun, so role labels are kept separate from grammatical function.
  • I4. Desire verbs that take a preposition are read as metaphorical motion toward a Goal: you long for or after the thing desired.
  • I5. Drawing a clear line between subjectless clauses and clauses with a dummy it keeps the analytic categories clean.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Evaluation sets for ambiguous lemmas could be built by drawing a small stratified sample that a human can fully check, rather than spot-checking a huge automatic pull.
  • I2 (tokens): The same two-step check could feed a variant-to-lemma table for archaic or nonstandard spellings in older fables and tales, and it would keep invented forms out of the table.
  • I3 (frames): Patterns like "it pleases me" or "methinks" should map the obj/obl pronoun to Experiencer instead of assuming the subject is always the one who feels.
  • I4 (world): A desire relation could be stored as a directed relation toward a goal entity, reusing the motion-frame machinery, which would let readers infer what a character is trying to reach.
  • I5 (tree): The parser and UD conversion should mark expletive it as expl so that later stages never create a participant entity for it.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidade de VigoVigo · Spain3 works · 4 citations

📚 Shelves 2 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1 English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Noelia Castro-Chao. 2021. The Development of long in Early Modern English: Impersonal Verbs of Desire in Focus. Atlantis 43.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.07

@inproceedings{castrochao2021development,
  title = {{The Development of long in Early Modern English: Impersonal Verbs of Desire in Focus}},
  author = {Noelia Castro-Chao},
  booktitle = {Atlantis 43},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.07},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.07}
}

References

46 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Allen, Cynthia. 1986. “Reconsidering the History of like.” Journal of Linguistics 22 (2): 375-409. —. 1995. Case Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford: Clarendon. ↗
  2. Anthony, Laurence. 2019. AntConc (version 3.5.8). Tokyo: Waseda University. [Accessed February 15, 2020]. find
  3. Biber, Douglas et al. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Longman. find
  4. Castro-Chao, Noelia. 2019. “Changes in Argument Structure in Early Modern English with Special Reference to Verbs of Desire: A Case Study of lust.” Research in Corpus Linguistics 7: 129-54. —. 2020. Argument Structure in Flux: The Development of Impersonal Constructions in Middle and Early Modern English, with Special Reference to Verbs of Desire. Bern: Peter Lang. ↗
  5. Cole, Roger William, ed. 1997. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP. find
  6. Croft, William. 1991. Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: The Cognitive Organization of Information. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P. find
  7. Davies, Mark. 2017. Early English Books Online (= EEBO). SAMUELS Project. [Accessed February 15, 2020]. —. 2018. The 14 Billion Word iWeb Corpus. [Accessed February 15, 2020]. find
  8. Dowty, David. 1991. “Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection.” Language 67 (3): 547-619. ↗
  9. Elmer, Willy. 1981. Diachronic Grammar: The History of Old and Middle English Subjectless Constructions. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ↗
  10. Fanego, Teresa. 1992. Infinitive Complements in Shakespeare’s English: Synchronic and Diachronic Aspects. Santiago de Compostela: Servicio de Publicacións e Intercambio Científico, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. —. 2017. “The trolley rumbled through the tunnel: On the History of the English Intransitive Motion Construction.” Folia Linguistica Historica 38: 29-73. find
  11. Fillmore, Charles J. 1977. “Topics in Lexical Semantics.” In Cole 1977, 76-138. —. 1986. “Pragmatically Controlled Zero Anaphora.” Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 95-107. find
  12. Fischer, Olga and Frederike van der Leek. 1983. “The Demise of the Old English Impersonal Construction.” Journal of Linguistics 19 (2): 337-68. ↗
  13. Fischer, Olga et al. 2000. The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ↗
  14. Fitzmaurice, Susan and Donka Minkova, eds. 2008. Studies in the History of the English Language IV. Berlin: De Gruyter. find
  15. Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P. —. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 2019. Explain Me This. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. find
  16. Hilpert, Martin. (2014) 2019. Construction Grammar and Its Application to English. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. find
  17. Huber, Judith. 2017. Motion and the English Verb: A Diachronic Study. Oxford: Oxford UP. ↗
  18. Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ↗ our card
  19. Jespersen, Otto. (1927) 1961. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Part III: Syntax (vol. 2). London: George Allen and Unwin. find
  20. Kay, Christian et al., eds. 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: With Additional Materials from A Thesaurus of Old English. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP. [Accessed February 15, 2020]. find
  21. Kurath, Hans, Sherman McAllister Kuhn and Robert Lewis, eds. 1952-2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. [Accessed February 15, 2020]. find
  22. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. find
  23. Levin, Beth. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P. find
  24. Lexico.com. 2019a. s. v. “Long.” [Accessed February 15, 2020]. find
  25. López-Couso, María José and Belén Méndez-Naya. 2015. “Secondary Grammaticalization in Clause Combining: From Adverbial Subordination to Complementation in English.” Language Sciences 47: 188-98. ↗
  26. Loureiro-Porto, Lucía. 2005. “The Semantic Predecessors of need: From Old to Early Modern English.” PhD diss., University of Santiago de Compostela. find
  27. McCawley, Noriko Akatsuka. 1976. “From OE/ME ‘Impersonal’ to ‘Personal’ Constructions: What is a ‘Subject-Less’ S?” In Steever, Walker and Mufwene 1976, 192-204. find
  28. Middle English Dictionary. 1952-2001a. s. v. “L ō̆ ngen.” [Accessed February 15, 2020]. —. 1952-2001b. s. v. “Th ē̆ r-at.” [Accessed February 15, 2020]. find
  29. Miura, Ayumi. 2015. Middle English Verbs of Emotion and Impersonal Constructions: Verb Meaning and Syntax in Diachrony. Oxford: Oxford UP. find
  30. Möhlig-Falke, Ruth. 2012. The Early English Impersonal Construction: An Analysis of Verbal and Constructional Meaning. Oxford: Oxford UP. find
  31. Noonan, Michael. 1985. “Complementation.” In Shopen 1985, 42-140. find
  32. Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma. 2017. “‘Terrific-Looking Creatures and Terrific, Funny Guys’: On the Historical Development of English terrific.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 55: 65-85. find
  33. Oxford English Dictionary. 2000a. s. v. “Long.” [Accessed February 15, 2020]. —. 2000b. s. v. “Therefore.” [Accessed February 15, 2020]. —. 2000c. s. v. “Therefor.” [Accessed February 15, 2020]. —. 2000d. s. v. “Thereat.” [Accessed February 15, 2020]. —. 2000e. s. v. “Shall.” [Accessed February 15, 2020]. find
  34. Perek, Florent. 2008. “Towards a Constructional Approach to Automatic Argument Structure Acquisition: The Case of Oblique Phrases.” Master’s thesis, Université de Lille III. find
  35. Petré, Peter. 2013. Early English Books Online Corpus 1.0. Leuven: KU Leuven. find
  36. Shopen, Timothy, ed. 1985. Complex Constructions. Vol 2, Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. find
  37. Simpson, John, ed. 2000. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP. [Accessed February 15, 2020]. find
  38. Steever, Sanford, Carol Walker and Salikoko Mufwene, eds. 1976. Papers from the Parasession on Diachronic Syntax. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistics Society. find
  39. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1972. A History of English Syntax: A Transformational Approach to the History of English Sentence Structure. New York and London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. find
  40. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford UP. ↗
  41. Trousdale, Graeme. 2008. “Words and Constructions in Grammaticalization: The End of the English Impersonal Construction.” In Fitzmaurice and Minkova 2008, 301-26. ↗
  42. Van der Gaaf, Willem. 1904. The Transition from the Impersonal to the Personal Construction in Middle English. Heidelberg: C. Winter. find
  43. Visser, Fredericus. 1963. Syntactical Units with One Verb. Part 1, An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: E. J. Brill. find
  44. Noelia Castro-Chao holds a BA in English Language and Literature and a PhD in English Linguistics (May 2020). find
  45. Until November 2019, she worked under funding from an FPU grant at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where she is currently a researcher at the unit for “Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization.” Her research interests include historical syntax and semantics, corpus linguistics and Construction Grammar. find
  46. Revised version accepted 30 June 2020 find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/castro-chao-2021-development-long-early-modern-english/