Constructions in competition: The development of the impersonal verb "hunger" and the adjectival periphrasis "be hungry" in Early Modern English
The present study is concerned with the syntactic and semantic development of the impersonal verb "hunger" in Early Modern English. An analysis of corpus data has been carried out on ca. 20 million words drawn from EEBOCorp 1.0 (1473–1700). Results show that, from a semantic perspective, t...
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| Tipo de documento: | artigo |
| Data de publicação: | 2022 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) |
| Repositório: | Docta Complutense |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/101878 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/101878 |
| Access Level: | Acceso aberto |
| Palavra-chave: | 811.111'367.625 811.111'367 811.111'37 81-112 Verbs of desire Corpus linguistics Impersonal construction Semantic change Syntactic change Filología inglesa Lingüística 5702 Lingüística Diacrónica 5702.01 Lingüística Histórica 5705.13 Sintaxis, Análisis Sintáctico 5705.08 Semántica |
| Resumo: | The present study is concerned with the syntactic and semantic development of the impersonal verb "hunger" in Early Modern English. An analysis of corpus data has been carried out on ca. 20 million words drawn from EEBOCorp 1.0 (1473–1700). Results show that, from a semantic perspective, the verb "hunger" undergoes a process of metaphorical extension involving a change from the original meaning ‘to feel hunger’, in the domain of Physical Sensation, to the meaning ‘to desire’, in the domain of Emotion. In this latter sense, the verb becomes predominantly associated with prepositional complements (e.g. 1542, "our hungry soules [...] hunger for y^ word of God"). Also in the course of the Early Modern period, the verb is subject to competition with the adjectival periphrasis "be hungry", especially in the sense ‘to feel hunger’. The article concludes by putting forward hypotheses to explain the motivations for these various developments. |
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