Castro Chao, Noelia2024-02-202024-02-202022Castro-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, 273-296http://hdl.handle.net/10347/32872The 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.eng© 2021 The Author. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Atribución 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Verbs of desireCorpus linguisticsImpersonal constructionSemantic changeSyntactic changejournal article10.1080/00393274.2020.1851297open access