A Semantic-Cognitive Approach to the Entrenchment of the Recipient Passive in Late Modern English

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K02602
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Nara University of Education
• Principal Investigator: Yonekura Yoko 奈良教育大学, 英語教育講座, 准教授 (20403313)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 文法化 / 構文化 / 受益者受動構文 / 後期近代英語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study explored diachronic aspects of the English recipient passive, i.e. the passive of ditransitive verbs in which the nominal phrase playing the semantic role of recipient is made the subject. The attested data from the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (Version 3) showed that a great deal of lexical variation in the acceptance of the recipient passive was still apparent in late ModE. Analyzing the corpus data and findings in previous studies, I have claimed that the acceptance of the recipient passive follows the compatibility hierarchy of ‘TELL > PAY > GIVE > BRING > GET / verbs of creation.’ I argued that (i) the presence of existing exemplars paved the way for the entrenchment of the recipient passive, and (ii) an obligatory participant role to be fused with the recipient argument played an important role in determining how compatible individual verbs were with the recipient passive. I also analyzed relationships between grammaticalization and syntactic fixation.

Free Research Field

英語学