Grammaticalization of the Particle away in English: A Cartographic Approach

Abstract

This study investigates the historical development of the particle away in English. Assuming the three-layered VP structure proposed by Ramchand (2008), and the Inner Aspect proposed by Travis (1994Travis ( , 2010, Fujita and Matsumoto (2005), and Ogawa and Niinuma (2013), I argue that there are three positions available for the particle away: the directional away is located in Res, which is the lowest in the VP structure, the completive aspectual away is in Asp(completive), which is above Proc, and the continuative or iterative aspectual away is in Asp(continuative or iterative), which is above Asp(completive). The data from Corpus of Historical American English show that the continuative or iterative aspectual away has been concatenated with the activity verbs earlier than accomplishment verbs, which is compatible with the syntactic analysis of grammaticalization proposed by Roberts and Roussou (2003).