The shaping of the Late Modern English Reaction Object Construction

Abstract

This paper provides a concise overview of my current research project on the characterisation and history of the English Reaction Object Construction (ROC) from the perspective of Diachronic Construction Grammar (Hilpert 2013; Traugott and Trousdale 2013). It shows that the English ROC, as in Pauline smiled her thanks, qualifies as a form-meaning pairing whose origins go back to Early Modern English (Bouso 2020). Its development, on the other hand, takes place in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century alongside other transitivising constructions. On the basis of a self-compiled corpus of nineteenth-century novels (Ruano San Segundo and Bouso 2019) and the visualisation tool of ‘animated’ motion charts (Hilpert 2011; Hilpert and Perek 2015), it is argued here that the sentimental novel and other innovative uses of reporting speech must have played a role in the shaping and modelling of the Late Modern English ROC.