RT Book,_Section T1 The shaping of the Late Modern English Reaction Object Construction A1 Bouso, Tamara A2 López-Ropero, Lourdes A2 Prieto, Sara A2 Sánchez Fajardo, José Antonio K1 Reaction Object Construction K1 Diachronic Construction Grammar K1 Motion chart K1 Sentimental novel K1 Reporting speech AB 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. PB Universidad de Alicante SN 978-84-1302-079-2 YR 2020 FD 2020 LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/33276 UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/33276 LA eng NO Bouso, T. (2020). The shaping of the Late Modern English Reaction Object Construction. En: López Ropero, L.; Prieto García-Cañedo, S. & J. A. Sánchez Fajardo. Thresholds and ways forward in English Studies. Alicante: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante. pp. 179-191 DS Minerva RD 28 abr 2026