Chapter published in:
Late Modern English: Novel encountersEdited by Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg
[Studies in Language Companion Series 214] 2020
► pp. 204–218
Women writers in the 18th century
The semantics of motion in their choice of perfect auxiliaries
Nuria Calvo Cortés | Universidad Complutense Madrid
The present study analyses perfect auxiliaries
combined with a set of verbs that semantically encode an idea of
motion, either physical or metaphorical (arrived, become,
come, departed, entered, fallen, gone, got, grown, passed,
returned and run) in a corpus of eight
novels written by four women in the 18th century, Burney, Inchbald,
Radcliffe and Wollstonecraft. The focus is on whether the semantics
of the components of motion situations conditioned their choice of
auxiliary, and on whether there are differences within the texts
depending on where the perfect structures appear, in the narration
or in the dialogue. The conclusion indicates that the semantics of
motion situations, particularly the different types of
figure and ground, may have conditioned their
choices.
Published online: 18 March 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.214.09cal
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.214.09cal
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