The shaping of the late modern englishreaction object construction

  1. Tamara Bouso 1
  1. 1 Universitat de les Illes Balears
    info

    Universitat de les Illes Balears

    Palma, España

    ROR https://ror.org/03e10x626

Libro:
Thresholds and Ways Forward in English Studies
  1. Lourdes López Ropero (coord.)
  2. Sara Prieto García-Cañedo (coord.)
  3. José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo (coord.)

Editorial: Universidad de Alicante / Universitat d'Alacant

ISBN: 978-84-1302-079-2

Ano de publicación: 2020

Páxinas: 179-191

Congreso: Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. Congreso (43. 2020. Valencia)

Tipo: Achega congreso

Resumo

This paper provides a concise overview of my current research project on the characterisation and history of the English Reaction Object Construction (ROC) from the perspective of Diachronic Construction Grammar (Hilpert 2013; Traugott and Trousdale 2013). It shows that the English ROC, as in Pauline smiled her thanks, qualifies as a form-meaning pairing whose origins go back to Early Modern English (Bouso 2020). Its development, on the other hand, takes place in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century alongside other transitivising constructions. On the basis of a self-compiled corpus of nineteenth-century novels (Ruano San Segundo and Bouso 2019) and the visualisation tool of ‘animated’ motion charts (Hilpert 2011; Hilpert and Perek 2015), it is argued here that the sentimental novel and other innovative uses of reporting speech must have played a role in the shaping and modelling of the Late Modern English ROC.