Changes in argument structure: developments in impersonal constructions since late middle English. A preliminary corpus-based study

Abstract

This MA thesis is an investigation into the so-called impersonal construction (e.g. Me liketh nat to lye ‘I do not like to lie’), with a focus on the Late Middle English and Early Modern English periods. Morphosyntactically, impersonal constructions share the characteristic that they contain a finite verb inflected for the third person singular, but lack a subject marked for the nominative case controlling verbal agreement. In English, the impersonal construction has been lost, being replaced by personal patterns (e.g. ME hym nedde ‘[there] was need [to] them’ > ModE they needed) or by syntactic patterns with an expletive non-referential subject (‘dummy it’): OE sniwde ‘snowed’ > ModE it snowed, among others. The purpose of the thesis is: 1) to examine the frequency of the different syntactic patterns that came to replace the impersonal construction in the period of time from Late Middle English onwards; 2) to look into the different stylistic and discoursive factors involved in the change, as well as into the pace of the process of replacement; and 3) to explore the hypothesis posited in recent research on impersonals that the loss of the impersonal construction is connected with a large-scale readjustment of the taxonomy of transitive constructions. To achieve these goals, a corpus-based study was carried out, focusing on a selection of formerly impersonal verbs comprised in the semantic domain of emotion.