On the inherent semantic meaning of double object Latinate verbs in English in modern and historical perspective (original) (raw)
Related papers
Volume 10 – Outposts of Historical Corpus Linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a Proliferation of Resources, 2012
This study takes a closer look at the development of a prepositional object construction selected by give verbs and motion verbs in OE and ME. Specifically, it shows that with the erosion of the morphological case system this construction started to develop two underlying variants of meaning. Each variant was determined by lexical meaning of a verb. As a result, the variant with give verbs realized a caused possession meaning, while the variant with motion verbs realized a caused motion meaning. Next, the analysis reassesses the approaches to Latinate double object verbs and proposes a new perspective on approaching their lexical meaning realization in the prepositional object construction.
Ditransitives in Middle English: On semantic specialisation and the rise of the dative alternation
This paper discusses the plausibility of a correlation or even a causal relation between two phenomena that can be observed in the history of English ditransitives. The changes concerned are: First, the emergence of the 'dative alternation', i.e. the establishment of a link between the double-object construction (DOC) and its prepositional paraphrase, and second, a reduction in the range of verb classes associated with the DOC, with the construction's semantics becoming specialised to basic transfer-senses. Empirically, the paper is based on a quantitative analysis of the occurrences of the DOC as well as its prepositional competitors in the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 2nd edition (PPCME2). On the basis of these results, it will be argued that the semantic narrowing and the increasing ability of ditransitive verbs to be paraphrased by a to-prepositional construction (to-POC) interacted in a bidirectional causal manner.
Ditransitive verbs in Latin: a typological approach
Journal of Latin Linguistics, 2018
This paper aims to describe the behaviour of Latin verbs with three arguments basically encoding the transfer of a Theme from an Agent to a Recipient: these verbs, labelled as ditransitives within the framework of linguistic typology, will be analyzed here on the basis of this theoretical approach. Across languages, the object arguments of ditransitives may be marked as the Patient of monotransitives or differently from it, giving rise to various types of alignment: the most frequent are the indirective, the secundative and the neutral alignment. In Latin, these three basic types of alignment are attested with ditransitives in the active and passive voice, although they are differently distributed across lexicon. Moreover, some verbs allow more than one type of encoding of the relevant arguments, showing alternating alignments. I shall focus on the reasons of the distribution and alternation of the three types, with the goal of providing a point of departure for a deeper understanding of ditransitives in the Latin language.
BASIC VERBS OF POSSESSION - A CONTRASTIVE AND TYPOLOGICAL STUDY
Unison in multiplicity: Cognitive and typological perspectives on grammar and lexis. CogniTextes Vol. 4, 2010
Verbs of possession such as HAVE and GIVE have been extensively studied both typologically and from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The present study presents an analysis of possession verbs as a semantic field with a focus on the most basic verbs. It combines a corpus-based contrastive analysis with a sketch of a general lexical typology of possession verbs. The contrastive part consists of an analysis primarily of the Swedish verbs ge 'give', få 'get' and ta 'take' and their correspondents in some genetically and/or areally related languages. Data are taken from two translation corpora, the large English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and the Multilingual Pilot Corpus (MPC) consisting of extracts from Swedish novels and their published translations into English, German, French and Finnish. The study of ta is concerned in particular with the relation between the many concrete uses of the verb, which are based on the interpretation of taking as a goal-directed action sequence. The account of Swedish ge 'give' and få 'get' are brief summaries of earlier studies concerned with patterns of polysemy and grammaticalization. In particular the verb få 'get' has a complex and relatively language-specific such pattern including modal, aspectual and causative grammatical meanings. The meanings GIVE, TAKE, GET and HAVE are all realized as verbs with very high frequency in the Germanic languages. This appears to be a rather language-specific characteristic. The typological part presents a tentative typology and gives a brief overview of some of the ways in which the corresponding meanings are realized in languages that are not included in the corpus.
Bulletin of Hispanic studies, 1985
In the period of about 400 years which stretches from the mid-twelfth century to the early sixteenth century a number of changes take place in Castilian affecting copular verbs, verbs of possession and Perfect auxiliary verbs.' They are: A. The generalization of haber as the unique Perfect auxiliary, ousting ser, which had been the Perfect auxiliary for reflexive and certain intransitive verbs; B. The cessation of agreement of the past participle of a transitive Perfect with its direct object; C. The loss of possessive meaning by baber in favour of its rival teneri D. The complete supplanting of ser by estar with locative adverbial complements; E. The increased use of estar with certain kinds of prepositional phrase and adjective; F. The creation of a 'resultant state passive' formed by estar with the past participle, in opposition to the 'action passive' formed by ser with the past participle, which had existed since earliest Romance; G. The creation of a full paradigm of compound forms for auxiliary ser, which had not been fully exploited in early Old Spanish. Two other changes which do not have the same degree of systematic impact on the language may also be mentioned: H. The further extension of tener to the role of Perfect auxiliary, which, however, it does not sustain; J. The steady increase in frequency of the reflexive. Let us imagine that there was a gap of 400 years in the philological record corresponding to this period, so that we had a picture only of the gross changes which had taken place. It would be possible to give a hypothesized causal account of these changes in the following structural term's: HYPOTHESIS A. There is a relationship between changes A, Band C above. It is generally accepted by Romance scholars that the use of HABERE as a Perfect auxiliary develops out of its possessive value.e Vulgar Latin HABEO LIBRUM COMPARATUM, the prototype of Spanish he comprado ellibro, must have gone through the semantic steps of (a) literal possession ('I possess the book which I bought'); (b) a state resulting from a completed act ('The book I possess is in the state of having been bought'); (c) the act itself, 337
Some notes on the realizations of the direct object in the old language
In the present article, we aim to analyse some constructions with the direct object realized as a personal or animate noun in the old language in order to emphasize certain syntactic features which have been only partially preserved or even eliminated from the modern language. On the one hand, we point to the construction with a bare direct object, which is recorded quite extensively in the context of wider range of selecting verbs than in the present-day language, on the other, we focus on the p(r)e-marking variation in the context of personal nouns with a specific / non-specific reading, as well as on the competition between the direct object generic singular and plural (pre sărac(ul) 'dom poor.def' vs pre săraci 'dom poor.m.pl' / săracii 'poor.m.pl.def').
On prefixes and actionality in Classical and Late Latin
Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2003
In Early and Classical Latin, we encounter a rich and complex system in which prefixes are used to render verbs telic and to emphasise the beginning or end of a process or of an activity, and in which the opposition between non-dynamicity and dynamicity or between transitivity and intransitivity is expressed by various suffixes. In the perfect there is an opposition between non-dynamic unprefixed verbs and dynamic prefixed ones. In the later centuries this system breaks down, and there is a blurring of the semantic difference between the prefixed and unprefixed verbs and often also of that between the prefixes themselves. New verbs are formed to replace old verbs that have lost their old functions. These changes pervade the whole verbal system in Latin and affect the semantic relationship between the perfect and imperfect tenses. In Romance, the definite and indefinite articles express the functions previously expressed by the various actional forms.