Contact-Induced Changes in the Argument Structure of Middle English Verbs on the Model of Old French

Bibliographic Data

ID12987569
AuthorsCarola Trips (University of Mannheim, corresponding author), Achim Stein (0000-0001-8848-1977, University of Stuttgart, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume12
Issue1
Pages232-267
Publication date2019-02-27
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Language Contact (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1955-2629 • E-ISSN: 1877-4091
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/19552629-01201008
OpenAlexW2920926542
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited9

This paper investigates contact-induced changes in the argument structure of Middle English verbs on the model of Old French. 1 We study two issues: i) to what extent did the English system retain and integrate the argument structure of verbs copied from French? ii) did the argument structure of these copied verbs influence the argument structure of native verbs? Our study is based on empirical evidence from Middle English corpora as well as a full text analysis of the Ayenbite of Inwyt and focusses on a number of verbs governing a dative in French. In the first part of the paper we define the contact situation and relate it to Johanson’s (2002) model of code copying. In the second part we comment on Allen’s (1995) study of please and some other psych verbs and corroborate her assumptions that i) semantic similarity triggered change within the set of these verbs, and ii) this change has reflexes in the syntactic realisation of the dative argument as a prepositional phrase. We propose a method to identify contact-induced change beyond the verb class originally affected. More explicitly, based on further empirical evidence, we show that the argument structure of the native verb give , a transfer of possession verb, was also affected by these changes and that these effects are stronger in texts that are directly influenced by French

Argument (complex analysis · Dative case · Grammar · Linguistics · Phrase structure rules · Possession (linguistics · Verb · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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