One Hour Hath Orphan’d Me, and Widow’d Me

This paper examines the development of syntactic and semantic features of verbs converted from human nouns in the history of English, some of which can be paraphrased with make (e.g., orphan “to make someone an orphan”; orphan verbs) and others with act (e.g., captain “to act as a captain for/toward someone”; captain verbs). A careful analysis of quotations in their OED entries demonstrates that the sixteenth century marks the most important turning point. On the one hand, the sudden rise in the number of members in both verb classes, including those which could belong to both (e.g., fool), caused increased variety in parent nouns and made it more difficult to predict whether they would become orphan verbs or captain verbs. On the other, syntactic features associated with these verbs today (passivisation, co-occurrence with the dummy object it and a particle) spread and became more instrumental in determining the meaning of the converted verb

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential · Modal verb · Noun · Object (grammar · Point (geometry · Variety (cybernetics · Verb · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence · History · Philosophy

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