How fear developed from an object to a subject experiencer verb: Remarks on argument structure change

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Abstract

This paper offers quantitative observations on the argument structural change from object to subject experiencers for the verb fear (from causative ‘frighten’ to stative ‘feel fear’) during late medieval and Early Modern English. The empirical statements are based on a corpus of 7.5m words spanning 1350–1600. The paper explores the precise time course of the change, disambiguating cues and ambiguous contexts, the influence of other lexical items, and other facts. In so doing, it reconstructs the history of the argument structure change in fear. It introduces a concept of “polysemous competition” as a more abstract type of change exemplified by this specific case, presents a survey of observable phenomena that may generally accompany such a development, and discusses other implications.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1
Number of pages44
JournalJournal of Historical Linguistics
Volume15
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Dec 2024

Keywords

  • historical linguistics
  • the verb fear
  • Middle English
  • psych verbs
  • corpus linguistics
  • argument structure
  • anguage change

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