An exemplar-based approach to composite predicates in the history of American English

Abstract

This study examines composite predicates (CPs) in the history of American English and uses an exemplar-based model to explain changes in the frequency of verb–noun pairings over time. Two different types of verb-nominal CPs are considered, including those liketake a look, in which a light verb occurs with an abstract nominal object, and others likelose sight, with a more lexically specific verb. Using a corpus of texts written between 1820 and 2009, I track the frequency of different CPs and analyze several families of semantically related nouns that occur with the same verb (e.g.take a look,peak, etc.). Representative families are analyzed to determine the presence of highly frequent verb–noun pairings, or exemplars, that separate themselves over time. The success of exemplars is evaluated according to several factors that may shape patterns of use, including the relative size of noun families, the frequency band of tokens of each family and the distribution of tokens across types within a family. Results indicate that the two types of CPs differ with respect to the evolution and success of exemplary verb–noun pairings and indicate that frequency bands play a role while the size of the noun family and their distributional patterns do not.