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).
This article examines the development of the subordinators till and until as minor complementizers in the Late Middle English and Early Modern English periods. An analysis of data obtained from a number of sources shows that till/ until underwent a process of secondary grammaticalization, emerging as complementizers introducing clauses governed by the desiderative predicate long. The findings further suggest that the use of till/ until-clauses with long was the result of a process of lexical diffusion from the semantically related pattern think ( it) long till/until-clause (in the sense of ‘to seem or appear long, to be wearisome (to a person) (until something happens)’). In Late Modern English, till/until-clauses following long were lost and replaced by competing patterns with to-infinitives and for. . .to-infinitives, the latter emerging at the time as a new complement type. The article discusses the motivations and broader implications of the obsolescence of till/until-complements, which failed to spread to other members of the class of verbs of “desire,” such as desire, thirst, or yearn, and thus remained at the margins of the English system of complementation.
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