RT Journal Article
T1 Constructions in competition: The development of the impersonal verb hunger and the adjectival periphrasis be hungry in Early Modern English
A1 Castro Chao, Noelia
K1 Verbs of desire
K1 Corpus linguistics
K1 Impersonal construction
K1 Semantic change
K1 Syntactic change
AB The present study is concerned with the syntactic and semantic development of the impersonal verb hunger in Early Modern English. An analysis of corpus data has been carried out on ca. 20 million words drawn from EEBOCorp 1.0 (1473–1700). Results show that, from a semantic perspective, the verb hunger undergoes a process of metaphorical extension involving a change from the original meaning ‘to feel hunger’, in the domain of Physical Sensation, to the meaning ‘to desire’, in the domain of Emotion. In this latter sense, the verb becomes predominantly associated with prepositional complements (e.g. 1542, our hungry soules [...] hunger for y^ word of God). Also in the course of the Early Modern period, the verb is subject to competition with the adjectival periphrasis be hungry, especially in the sense ‘to feel hunger’. The article concludes by putting forward hypotheses to explain the motivations for these various developments.
PB Taylor and Francis
YR 2022
FD 2022
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/32872
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/32872
LA eng
NO Castro-Chao, N. (2022). Constructions in competition: The development of the impersonal verb hunger and the adjectival periphrasis be hungry in Early Modern English, Studia Neophilologica, 94:3, 273-296
NO The European Regional Development Fund, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant FFI2017-86884-P) and the Regional Government of Galicia (Directorate General for Scientific and Technological Promotion, grant ED431B 2020/01).
DS Minerva
RD 24 abr 2026