Peste 4 milioane de titluri în engleză și alte limbi! Descoperă-ți noua poveste astăzi!

Află starea comenzii

Contactați-ne

Constructions and Environments

Copular, Passive, and Related Constructions in Old and Middle English

Autor: Peter Petre

Limbă:

Legare: Copertă tare

Editura: Oxford University Press Inc

Disponibilitate: În depozitul extern

Expediem în 10-18 zile

498.68 lei

This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb const...

Informații despre carte

Autor

Peter Petre

Limbă

engleză

Legare

Carte - Copertă tare

Publicat

2014

Pagini

320

EAN

9780199373390

ISBN

0199373396

Enbook ID

04532370

Editura

Oxford University Press Inc

Greutate

550

Dimensiuni

156 x 242 x 26

Descriere completă

This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. The mysterious loss of the high-frequency verb weorthan 'become' is explained as a casualty of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. The merger of is 'is' and bith 'shall be, is generally' into a single suppletive verb is related to the development of a general analytic future shall be. The co-occurrence of multiple changes led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing copulas, from which they analogically adopted full productivity in one fell swoop. In explaining each of these changes, the book 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, Peter Petre 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, Petre 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.