Teresa Fanego

Developments in argument linking in early Modern English gerund phrases

This paper discusses the internal structure of eModE gerund phrases, with special reference to the verbalization of subjects and objects in the course of the period. It is shown that the gerunds acquisition of common case subjects (‘ John looking at me’) and of direct objects (‘by seeing Jane ’) correlates with style, the new verbalized complements being recorded first in the more oral and informal registers. Attention is also paid to the influence of absolute participles on the replacement of PossPs (‘ Johns looking at me’) by NPs as subject arguments, and to the diffusion of direct objects across the various classes of gerunds. The mixed nomino-verbal properties exhibited by many gerundive nominals by the late seventeenth century are considered in detail, and an analysis is proposed which interprets them as determiner phrases (DPs) where the head D can select various categories of complements. Alongside this phrasal type of gerund, it is argued that a clausal one with fully verbal features must also be recognized as part of the grammar of eModE.

The trolley rumbled through the tunnel: On the history of the English Intransitive Motion Construction

Abstract This article examines the history, from Old English times to the first quarter of the twentieth century, of the Intransitive Motion Construction. It compares the development of its result subschema (The trolley rumbled through the tunnel), where the verb is one of sound emission, with the development of other subschemas of the construction, in particular the manner subschema (The man walked in), where the verb denotes manner of motion. As shown by earlier research, the manner subschema and the manner of motion lexicon have greatly expanded since the Old English period, especially in Modern English. The result subschema, by contrast, although attested as far back as Old English, remains marginal until the nineteenth century, when it finally gains in importance, thus making the Intransitive Motion Construction more versatile. This expansion in the conceptual range of the construction, from predominantly coding manner of motion to describing other highly specific details of motion, such as the sound resulting from it, is linked to the addition to the English lexicon, in relatively recent times, of a great number of new sound verbs whose frequency of use has been constantly on the increase. Furthermore, the paper argues that these changes in the English sound verb inventory are also responsible for some of the developments undergone by the so-called Way-construction (The steamer plashed its way forward) in the Late Modern English period.

Pronoun omission and agreement: An analysis based on ICE Singapore and ICE India

Abstract This article deals with pronoun omission in subject position and its connection with subject-verb agreement in Indian English and Singapore English. Agreement morphology has been found to be a predictor and facilitator of pronoun omission cross-linguistically in that it aids in the identification and retrieval of the referents of omitted pronouns. The results of a corpus study partly confirm this trend, since they show that agreement morphology does have a weak facilitating effect in both varieties examined; that is, pronoun omission increases when the subject and the verb agree in person and number. However, this is only true for lexical verbs; non-modal auxiliaries (i.e., be, have, do), on the contrary, show a low percentage of omitted pronouns and no facilitating effect of agreement morphology. To account for this finding, the possible inhibiting effect on pronoun omission of the frequency of co-occurrence of pronouns and non-modal auxiliaries was also explored.

Multiple Sources in Language Change: the Role of Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in the Formation of English ACC-ing Gerundives

This chapter examines the rise of ACC-ing gerundives (ACC-ing for short), as in (1–2), in the light of recent proposals (see Van de Velde et al. 2013, and references therein) on the possible multiplicity of source constructions in language change, with change understood as often involving historically distinct ‘lineages’ merging into a new lineage.

Report on the 38th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Valencia, 7–10 September 2005)

Abstract The 38th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) took place in Valencia, Spain, from 7 to 10 September 2005. The meeting, whose central theme was “Formal, functional and typological perspectives on discourse and grammar”, was organized by Salvador Pons and the Department of Spanish Philology at the University of Valencia. It attracted quite a number of participants from a variety of European and non-European countries, who presented a total of over 200 papers during the three and a half conference days.