Directional Out Of in the History of English: Grammaticalization and Reanalysis

Abstract

In Present-Day English, the particle out is obligatorily adjacent to the following of PP, as in He pulled the plugs out of his ears / *He pulled out the plugs of his ears, even though particles can normally precede or follow the object of the particle verb, as in Hepulled out the plugs / Hepulled the plugs out. Interestingly, in Old English and Middle English, the particle out could occur either adjacent or nonadjacent to the of PP. Based on corpus data covering the period from Old English to Late Modern English, I show that the change in the syntax of directional out of involves grammaticalization: The bleaching of the directional meaning of the preposition of led to a structural reanalysis by which the of PP became included in the particle's phrasal projection and could no longer be separated from the particle out. This in turn led to phono-logical reduction of the preposition of. The loss of the nonadjacent option is argued to be connected to the status of particles as optionally projecting elements.*