Multi Word Verbs In Early Modern English

In a revision of her doctoral thesis (no date or institution cited), which itself grew out of the project to compile the database Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640-1740), Claridge looks at the use of such multi-word verbs as get clear, wish for, and make merry as they appear in the database. She considers both syntax and semantics, which she shows merge to some extent, but takes semantics to be the primary and thus the more important level because people know how they are going to say something before they know what they are going to say. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The topic of this book fits in with the recently growing interest in phraseology and fixedness in English. It offers a description of multi-word verbs in the language of the 17th and 18th centuries, an important formative period for Modern English. For the first time, multi-word verbs are treated together as a group, as it is argued that phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations and verbo-nominal combinations share defining characteristics. These characteristics are also reflected in similar possibilities of usage, in particular the subtle modification of verbal meaning and these verbs' potential for topicalization structures, both leading to a greater expressiveness. Using a new text collection, the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640-1740), the study provides a description of the multi-word verb types found, their syntactic behaviour, and their semantic structure. The composition of the corpus also allowed the examination of the development of these verbs over time and in different registers. The corpus study is supplemented by an investigation of attitudes towards multi-word verbs with the help of contemporary works on language, leading to a more speculative discussion of the factors influencing the choice between multi-word and simplex verbs.

The book traces the evolution of the English verb-particle construction (‘phrasal verb’) from Indo-European and Germanic up to the present. A contrastive survey of the basic semantic and syntactic characteristics of verb-particle constructions in the present-day Germanic languages shows that the English construction is structurally unremarkable and its analysis as a periphrastic word-formation is proposed. From a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective the Old English prefix verbs are identified as preverbs and the shift towards postposition of the particles is connected to the development of more general patterns of word order. The interplay of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic factors in the loss of the native prefixes in the history of English is investigated. In this context the question is discussed to what extent the older prefixes were replaced by particles and borrowed prefixes, how the characteristic etymological and semantic properties of the Modern English phrasal verbs can be explained and what role they play in the lexicon. The author argues that their common perception as particularly ‘English’, ‘colloquial’ and ‘informal’ has its origin in the eighteenth-century normative tradition.

A fine-grained qualitative and quantitative analysis of phrasal verbs covering almost 400 years, based on large amounts of empirical evidence.

The relationships among data, evidence, and methodology in English historical linguistics are perennially vexed. This volume– which ranges chronologically from Old to Present-Day English and from manuscripts to corpora– challenges a wide variety of assumptions and practices and illustrates how diverse methods and approaches construct evidence for historical linguistic arguments from an increasingly large and diverse body of linguistic data.

A long established and highly regarded account of all aspects of the English verb taking account of recent work on tense, phase and aspect, and of the author's own research. Theoretical discussion is kept to a minimum, but the arguments are always presented within a modern theoretical framework.