Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English

Abstract The syntactic and semantic properties of the into-causative construction, involving the pattern ‘V NP into V-ing’, has been studied in some detail, but its historical development has received less attention. This paper looks at the historical shifts in the construction with much more representative and robust corpora than have been used for previous studies. Based on nearly 11,440 tokens from more than 950 million words of text, the paper considers several important changes in the lexical, syntactic, and semantic properties of the construction. The study also establishes the value of large, diverse historical corpora and their role in researching syntactic and semantic change.

[1]  Juhani Rudanko.  Lexico‐Grammatical Innovation in Current British and American English: a Case Study on the Transitive into ‐ing Pattern with Evidence from the Bank of English Corpus , 2005 .

[2]  Mark Davies.  The importance of robust corpora in providing more realistic descriptions of variation in English grammar , 2014 .

[3]  Martin Hilpert,et al.  Distinctive collexeme analysis and diachrony , 2006 .

[4]  Mark Davies.  Expanding horizons in historical linguistics with the 400-million word Corpus of Historical American English , 2012 .

[5]  A. Goldberg.  Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure , 1995 .

[6]  Laura A. Michaelis.  Sign-based Construction Grammar Center for the Study of Language and Information , 2012 .

[7]  Mark Davies,et al.  The into-causative construction in English: a construction-based perspective 1 , 2015, English Language and Linguistics.

[8]  On the transitive "out of -ing" complementation pattern in contemporary spoken American English: A corpus-based study , 2013 .

[9]  Paul Baker.  Times may change but we'll always have money:a corpus driven examination of vocabulary change in four diachronic corpora. , 2011 .

[10]  J. Rudanko.  On verbs governing in ‐ing in present‐day English , 1991 .

[11]  Christian Mair,et al.  Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern English: a real-time study based on matching text corpora , 2002, English Language and Linguistics.

[12]  Günter Rohdenburg.  Functional constraints in syntactic change: The rise and fall of prepositional constructions in early and Late Modern English , 2007 .

[13]  Mark Davies.  Examining syntactic variation in English: The importance of corpus design and corpus size , 2013 .

[14]  Martin Hilpert,et al.  Construction Grammar and its Application to English , 2014 .

[15]  Mark Davies,et al.  The Corpus of Contemporary American English as the first reliable monitor corpus of English , 2010, Lit. Linguistic Comput..

[16]  Lauren Fonteyn,et al.  Usage-based perspectives on diachronic morphology: A mixed-methods approach towards English ing-nominals , 2016 .

[17]  Stefanie Wulff,et al.  Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans: Variety-specifc meaning construction in theinto-causative , 2007 .

[18]  Loraine I. Bridgeman.  More classes of verbs in English , 1965 .

[19]  Hans C. Boas,et al.  Sign-Based Construction Grammar , 2012 .

[20]  Susan Hunston,et al.  Book Reviews: Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English , 2000, CL.

[21]  Beth Levin,et al.  Lexical semantics and syntactic structure , 1996 .

[22]  Malka Rappaport Hovav,et al.  An Event Structure Account of English Resultatives , 2001 .

[23]  L. D. Cuypere.  The Old English to -dative construction , 2015 .

[24]  Mark Davies.  The 385+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990―2008+): Design, architecture, and linguistic insights , 2009 .

[25]  Juhani Rudanko.  Emergent Alternation in Complement Selection , 2006 .

[26]  Martti Juhani Rudanko.  Corpora and Complementation: Tracing Sentential Complementation Patterns of Nouns, Adjectives, and Verbs over the Last Three Centuries , 2000 .

[27]  S. Gries,et al.  Language, culture and mind , 2004 .

[28]  Paul Baker.  The BE06 Corpus of British English and recent language change , 2009 .

[29]  J. Rudanko.  Changes in Complementation in British and American English , 2011 .

[30]  Paul Baker.  Times May Change, But We Will Always Have Money: Diachronic Variation in Recent British English , 2011 .

[31]  Elizabeth Christie.  INVESTIGATING THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ENGLISH WAY-CONSTRUCTION AND THE FAKE REFLEXIVE RESULTATIVE CONSTRUCTION , 2011 .

[32]  Britta Mondorf,et al.  Variation and change in English resultative constructions , 2010, Language Variation and Change.