Changes in argument structure in the history of English, with special reference to the emergence and development of reaction object constructions

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the characterization and diachronic development of the so-called reaction object construction (ROC; Levin 1993, 98), as in She mumbled her adoration, Pauline smiled her thanks and The door jingled a welcome. The ROC consists of an intransitive verb ─particularly manner of speaking verbs such as mumble and mutter, but also verbs of gestures and sounds such as smile and jingle─ followed by a nonprototypical object that expresses a reaction or an attitude (adoration, thanks, welcome) such that the whole syntactic unit acquires the extended meaning “express/communicate/signal X by V-ing” as in ‘She expressed/communicated her adoration by mumbling’ and ‘The door expressed/signalled a welcome by jingling’ in the examples above. The theoretical framework adopted to account for the idiosyncratic nature of these expressive structures as well as their historical development is that of Construction Grammar and its recent application to language change (Goldberg 1995, 2006, Hilpert 2013, Traugott and Trousdale 2013). From a methodological perspective, this first historical study on the ROC primarily relies on data extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0 (1710-1920; De Smet et al. 2011) and the Corpus of Historical American English (1810s-2000s; Davies 2010-), three complementary data sources that address the different stages in the evolution of the construction since its beginnings until Present Day English. The hypothesis put forward is that ROCs are part of the large process of transitivization that has affected English since OE times (Visser, 1963-1973: I, §§132-144). Thus ROCs follow a similar historical pathway as other transitivizing/valency-increasing argument structure constructions such as the cognate object construction (The hart leapt a great leap) and the way-construction (She giggled her way up the stairs), both of which occurred first with transitive verbs and then expanded to intransitives (cf. Visser, 1963-1973: I, §424 (b): 415; Traugott and Trousdale 2013, 76-93; Lavidas Forthcoming). The results from the three major corpus-based studies conducted in this dissertation confirm this idea, and they also reveal striking parallelisms in the development of the ROC and the way-construction. These two valency-increasing constructions have their origins in the Late Middle English period (around the fifteenth century), acquire more prominence in Modern English (1500-1920) ─which is when they undergo a process of constructionalization becoming new form-meaning pairings with their own morphosyntactic and semantic constraints─, and over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ROC and the way-construction kept on undergoing further constructional changes. More specifically, they become more productive and schematic as they expand to new verb types and classes such as verbs of sound emission (purr and coo), and also, in the case of ROC, to novel verbs of instrument of communication (wire, cable and phone), verbs of activity (dance, drink, flutter and play) and verbs of light emission (flare, glisten and reflect).