Constructions and Environments: Copular, Passive, and Related Constructions in Old and Middle EnglishOxford University Press, 2014 - 295 pagina's This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. Peter Petré analyzes: - The mysterious loss of the high-frequency verb weorðan 'become' as a casualty of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. In explaining each of these changes, Petré goes beyond the level of the verb and its complements, drawing attention to analogical networks and the importance of a verb's embeddedness in clausal and textual environments. Using a radically usage-based approach, treating syntax as emerging from (changing) frequencies, Petré draws attention to general principles of constructional change, including but not limited to grammaticalization and lexicalization. He proposes novel parallelisms between linguistic and ecological evolution. Going beyond the view of language change as propagating only in social interaction, Petré explains how each individual's mental grammar can be seen as a dynamic ecosystem with hierarchical environments (clausal niches, textual habitats). In this view, the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated changes, itself resulting from cognitive economy principles, is arguably more decisive in lexical change than is functional competition. |
Inhoudsopgave
Chapter 1 Environmental Linguistics | 1 |
Chapter 2 In Dialogue with Previous Studies | 24 |
Chapter 3 Theory and Method | 49 |
Chapter 4 The Past Tense | 97 |
Chapter 5 The Present Tense | 160 |
Chapter 6 Copularization of becumeþ and weaxeþ | 197 |
Chapter 7 Evaluation of the Results | 227 |
Appendix 1 List of Primary Sources Cited | 237 |
Appendix 2 LEONalfa | 239 |
Appendix 3 Data | 252 |
Notes | 253 |
267 | |
285 | |
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Constructions and Environments: Copular, Passive, and Related Constructions ... Peter Petr? Gedeeltelijke weergave - 2014 |