Contact-Induced Changes in the Argument Structure of Middle English Verbs on the Model of Old French

Author:

Trips Carola1,Stein Achim2

Affiliation:

1. University of Mannheim, ctrips@mail.uni-mannheim.de

2. University of Stuttgart, achim.stein@ling.uni-stuttgart.de

Abstract

This paper investigates contact-induced changes in the argument structure of Middle English verbs on the model of Old French. 1 We study two issues: i) to what extent did the English system retain and integrate the argument structure of verbs copied from French? ii) did the argument structure of these copied verbs influence the argument structure of native verbs? Our study is based on empirical evidence from Middle English corpora as well as a full text analysis of the Ayenbite of Inwyt and focusses on a number of verbs governing a dative in French. In the first part of the paper we define the contact situation and relate it to Johanson’s (2002) model of code copying. In the second part we comment on Allen’s (1995) study of please and some other psych verbs and corroborate her assumptions that i) semantic similarity triggered change within the set of these verbs, and ii) this change has reflexes in the syntactic realisation of the dative argument as a prepositional phrase. We propose a method to identify contact-induced change beyond the verb class originally affected. More explicitly, based on further empirical evidence, we show that the argument structure of the native verb give, a transfer of possession verb, was also affected by these changes and that these effects are stronger in texts that are directly influenced by French.

Publisher

Brill

Subject

Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics

Cited by 12 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. Missing link: code-switches, borrowings, and accommodation biases;Linguistics Vanguard;2024-03-25

2. The Middle English prepositional dative;Ditransitives in Germanic Languages;2023-08-15

3. The VP in language contact: on creation event lexicalization in Canadian French;Folia Linguistica;2023-05-15

4. An Overview of Contact-Induced Morphosyntactic Changes in Early English;New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics;2023

5. Introduction;New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics;2023

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