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The results of contact: Tracing changes in resultativity encoding in the history of English in contact with French

ORCiD logo with link | Universität Mannheim
ORCiD logo with link | Universität Mannheim
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Abstract
This paper addresses the question to what extent the large influx of French verbs effected structural changes in the expression of resultativity in earlier English. Early French and English use distinctly different lexicalization patterns to encode motion and change-of-state events. In terms of Talmy’s (2000) typology, early English is a typical satellite-framing language, encoding Result outside the verb in a satellite, while French is a verb-framing language, encoding Result in the verb. A comprehensive corpus study of the lexical semantics of verbs occurring in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English reveals that French verbs establish a novel way of expressing Result: transitive state-incorporating verbs are introduced in Middle English and witness a consistent diachronic increase after that. Complementary distribution effects with satellite-framing constructions suggest that these verbs are copied with their featural properties in the mental lexicon, which we interpret in terms of Ramchand’s (2008) First Phase Syntax.
Article outline
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 The Syntax and Semantics of Verbal Roots in Contact
    • 2.1 Manner/Result Complementarity
    • 2.2 Different Types of Result Roots
    • 2.3 End state lexicalization in historical English and French
  • 3 Methodology
    • 3.1 Hypotheses
    • 3.2 Data Collection
    • 3.3 Data Annotation
      • 3.3.1 Manner verbs
      • 3.3.2 Result-COS (Change of state) verbs
      • 3.3.3 Result-state verbs
  • 4 The diachronic integration of French verbs into the English lexicon
    • 4.1 The lexical semantic contribution of French verbs
    • 4.2 The structural integration of French verbs
      • 4.2.1 Verb-particle combinations
      • 4.2.2 Weak and strong complementation patterns
  • 5 Theoretical integration in Ramchand’s First Phase Syntax model
  • 6 Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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