At the interface of grammaticalisation and lexicalisation: the case of take prisoner

Abstract

Brinton & Traugott (2005) and Brinton (2008) have suggested that light verb constructions of the type take a look (at) are instances of grammaticalisation. This article shows that this is because the emphasis has been on the verb take. Exploring the light verb construction take prisoner, we see that one and the same construction involves both lexicalisation and grammaticalisation processes. For grammaticalisation, the focus will be on the semantic bleaching of take and the productivity of the pattern take + NP. For the lexicalisation of the construction, we will focus on the increasing fixedness of the collocation take prisoner, evident from the decreasing acceptability of the pattern make prisoner, and on the decategorialisation of the original NP prisoner, which is manifested in the loss of plural -s inflection in prisoner. The article further investigates the decategorialisation of prisoner, revealing that the word order of prisoner(s) relative to its complement NP (e.g. take the men prisoner(s) vs take prisoner(s) the men) has a considerable effect on the speed of plural s-deletion.