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Journal of Historical Linguistics: Online-First Articles

How fear developed from an object to a subject experiencer verb

Remarks on argument structure change

ORCID logo | University of Manchester
This paper offers quantitative observations on the argument structural change from object to subject experiencers for the verb fear (from causative ‘frighten’ to stative ‘feel fear’) during late medieval and Early Modern English. The empirical statements are based on a corpus of 7.5m words spanning 1350–1600. The paper explores the precise time course of the change, disambiguating cues and ambiguous contexts, the influence of other lexical items, and other facts. In so doing, it reconstructs the history of the argument structure change in fear. It introduces a concept of “polysemous competition” as a more abstract type of change exemplified by this specific case, presents a survey of observable phenomena that may generally accompany such a development, and discusses other implications.
Keywords: historical linguistics, language change, argument structure, corpus linguistics, psych verbs, Middle English, the verb fear
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Material
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2Data retrieval, correction and coding
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Quantification of the time course of the change
    • 3.2The extent of ambiguity
      • 3.2.1Cues for the identification of the old and new argument structures
      • 3.2.2Cases of ambiguity between conservative and innovative fear
      • 3.2.3Evaluating the prevalence of ambiguity
    • 3.3The role of related verbs
      • 3.3.1Synonyms of conservative fear
      • 3.3.2The a-prefix
      • 3.3.3Coordination of synonyms
      • 3.3.4The role of other object experiencer verbs
      • 3.3.5The emergence of parenthetical uses
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Aknowledgements
  • Author queries
  • References
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