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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure
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Constructions and Environments - Copular, Passive, and Related Constructions in Old and Middle English (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,531
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Constructions and Environments - Copular, Passive, and Related Constructions in Old and Middle English (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in the History of English
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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