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

Abstract

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).

The Emergence and Loss of the English Minor Complementizerstillanduntil

“…I first carried out a pilot study of till/until in the EModE period. For this purpose, I consulted a subset of about twenty million words extracted from the Early English Books Online Corpus 1.0 (EEBOCorp 1.0, circa 525 million words, 1470-1700; Petré 2013; on the compilation of the subcorpus, see Castro-Chao [2021:79-100]). The data obtained showed that the collocation long + till/until -clause occurs with very low frequency, as only four examples were found, the earliest dating from 1582 (Richard Mulcaster, The first part of the elementarie ; see Table 1 for further details).…”

“…long , v. 1 Origin). It forms part of the class of verbs of desire, as defined by Levin (1993:194-195), which includes items such as ache, crave, hope , hunger, lust, thirst , wish , and yearn; these constitute a syntactically coherent group insofar as they involve two arguments: a person that desires something (i.e., a desirer) and a thing that is desired (i.e., a desired; see further Castro-Chao 2021:70).…”

Peeking into the socio-historical background and current use of ‘me (no)likey’

“…Despite having been firmly in the spotlight of linguistic studies for over a century (see van der Gaaf, 1904;Fischer & van der Leek, 1983;Allen, 1986Allen, , 1995Denison, 1990;Ogura, 1990;López-Couso, 1996;Méndez-Naya & López-Couso, 1997;Trousdale, 2008;Loureiro-Porto, 2010;Möhlig-Falke, 2012;Miura, 2015 andCastro-Chao, 2021, among many others), there is little consensus as to what impersonal constructions are. The use of alternative labels in recent times, such as impersonal, subjectless, quasi-impersonal, nominativeless or experiencer, among others, has only served to 'increase the already existing confusion' (Méndez-Naya & López-Couso, 1997: 185; see also Loureiro-Porto, 2010: 675-676).…”