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It Grew a Day of Expectation” ” It g rew a d ay of e xpectation ” A d iachronic c orpus s tudy on the e volution of the v erb g row in British English Rosaleena Luokkala D e partme n t of Engl ish Bache l or Degree Project English Linguist ics Autumn 20 1 8 Superv isor: Caroline Gentens ” It g rew a d ay of e xpectation ” A d iachronic c orpus s tudy on the e volution of t he v erb g row in British English Rosaleena Luokka la Abstract English ha s an extraordinary number of labi le verbs, that is, verbs that can be used both transitively with a causative sense and intransitively with an inchoative sense. This corpus - based stud y investigates the evolution of t he verb grow from exclusively intransitive to labile in British English in the Late Modern English period. A random sample of 500 instances of the verb grow was drawn from the period 1710 - 1780 a s well as from the p eriod 1850 - 1 920 of the Corpus of Late Mo de rn English Texts i n order to track diachronic changes . The instances in the samples were categorized according to their verb pattern and type of complement ( if any ) , and instances of the past participle grown were also categorized based on the auxiliary us ed ( be / have /none). The study suggest s that grow came to be used transitively when resultative intransitive constructions (e.g. be grown ( over )) were reanaly z ed as passives ; that the use of noun phrase complements with copular grow decreased and became archai c to make the di stinction betwe en copular and transitive uses less ambi gu ous ; and that the fact that the be - auxiliary was replaced by the have - auxiliary in perfect constructions helped avoid ambiguity between intransitive and transitive use s o f gro w . Thus , t he study provi des some empirical evidence for Visser's ( 1963 ) hypothesis that th e change from be - to ha ve - perfect s played a central role in the acquisition of lability. Keywords grow, labile ver b, transitivity, corpus study, diac hronic study. Con tents 1. Introduction ................................ ................................ ................... 1 2. Background ................................ ................................ ................... 2 3. Method and material ................................ ................................ ....... 6 3.1 Corpus linguistics ................................ ................................ ............ 6 3.2 The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts ................................ ........... 7 3.2.1 Extraction of data from the corpus ................................ .................... 7 4. Results ................................ ................................ .......................... 8 4.1 Intransitive instances ................................ ................................ ...... 8 4.1.1 Bare intransitive instances ................................ ............................... 9 4.1.2 Copular i nstances ................................ ................................ ........... 9 4.1.3 Ambiguous intransitive instances ................................ ..................... 12 4.1.4 Phrasal verbs ................................ ................................ ................ 13 4.2 Transitive instances ................................ ................................ ...... 14 4.3 Instances with auxiliary verbs ( have / be ) ................................ .......... 15 5. Conclusion ................................ ................................ ................... 16 References ................................ ................................ ...................... 18 1 . Introductio n Verbs are said to be “the most imp ortan t lexical and syntactic category of a language” (F ellbaum, 1990, p. 278). Whil e grammatical sentences in English can be compos ed without a referential noun, as in It is snowing , they must all contain at least one verb (Fellbaum, 1990, p. 278). Verbs a re al so considered “more complex” than nouns (Pickering & Frisso n, 2001, p. 557). Th e importance and compl e xity of verbs make them a n interesti ng category of l anguage to study. Verbs are distinguished by the syntactic patterns th ey can occur in; the two m ain p atterns are intransitive and transitive. Modern English is extra ordinary in that it has so many verbs that can be used both int ransitively (wi thout an object) and transitively (with an object) without formal marking to disti nguish between the two synt actic patterns. In this study, these verbs will be referred to a s ‘la bile ver bs’. There are esti mated to b e over 800 labile verbs in Present - d a y En glish ( PDE) ( McMillion, 2006, p. 185). The number is considerably smaller in other Germa nic languages (McMill ion, 2006, p. 185; Haspelmath, 1993) and it was also much smaller in O ld En glish ( 55 according to V isser, 1963 , p . 99 ). For some reason th e number of labile verbs in English se ems to be increasing. Due to research lacking in this field, not much is known a bout the mechan isms of lability and why and how specific verbs become labile (Kulikov & Lavidas, 2014, p . 872). Grow is an example of a labile verb in PDE . Th e verb has existed sin ce the Middle Ages , an d i t was originally used exclusively intransitively, a s in The corn grew fast (grow, n.d. - a). The earliest example of intransiti ve grow in the Oxford English Di ctionary (O ED ) i s from circa 888 (gr ow, n.d. - c) . A transitive sense meaning “t o produce or cultivate” appeared in the 1700s (grow, n.d. - a). The earlie st ex ample of this transitive use in the OED is from 1774: “They likewise grow some Rice and Tobacco, whic h is sen t t hr oug h Virginia” (grow , n .d. - c). The aim of the study is to invest igate the evolution of the verb grow and the context s in which it came to be u sed trans itively in British English. The study attempts to answer the following question: h ow has the verb gr ow d ev eloped a transitive use in British English over the course of th e Late Modern English period? The question will be in vestigated using th e Cor pus of La te Modern English Texts . The verb grow has been studied prev iously by Alam (2003) and Qing - Hua (2011). T he y both examine the poly semy of gro w from a synchronic perspective and demonstrate in different ways that the polysemy is a result of an exten sion of the verb’s basic literal me aning, that of t he devel opment of a living thing towards maturit y. However, th e diachronic dev elopment of transi ti ve grow has not been studied in detail before. The rest of the the sis is organized in the following wa y : c h apter 2 will describe the theoretical background ne cessary for understanding the categorization of the corpus ins ta nces a s well a s the fin dings ; c hap ter 3 wil l present the method and material used in the study ; i n chapter 4, the categorization and the find ings of the study will be presented ; f i nally, c hapter 5 will con clude the thesis. 1 2 . Background This pa rt will i nt roduce the con cept of transi tivity and discuss previous research on Engli sh labile verbs . T h is section will form the basis for understan ding the categorization of the corpus material . Transitivity refers to the abil ity of predicates to ta ke direct object s. A distinctio n is generally m ade between intr ansitive and transitive verbs: the former do not take objects, whereas the latter do. In En glish there are many verbs that can appear in both intransitive and tra nsitive verb patterns. The foll owing section de sc ri bing the ve rb patterns is b ased on McMillio n and the examples therein (n.d., p p . 30 - 35). The patterns are summarized in Table 1. Intr ansit ive verbs can be bare intransitive or copular. The bare intransitive pattern consists of a s ubject and a predicat or (i.e. a verb group ) . In this pattern t he subje ct either does or undergoes something, an d thus, the semantic role of the subject within this pattern can be that of an actor or that of an undergoer. The chair broke. The queen died. O scar coughed . The cop ul ar patte rn is seen as a sub - category of the int ransitive patter n. It consists of a subje ct, a predicator , and a subject predicative . The subj ect predicative is a complement that attaches , for example, a quality, characteristic , or location to t he subje ct. I n terms of s emanti cs, th is pattern often has the sen se of being or b ecoming. Harry is in the kitchen . Lucy became a doctor. Sh e grew anxious. Transitive verbs can be monotransitive, ditransitive, or complex transitive. The monotransit ive patte rn c onsists of a subjec t, a p redicator , and a di rect ob jec t . A direct obj ect is a complement in the form of a noun phrase or a subordinate claus e. The overall sense of this pattern is that the subject affects the direct object by d oing something to or with the object. Thus , the d irect object typica lly expres se s the patient role and can often take the place of the subject in a passive clause. Cha rlie despises him. They grew cabbages. I hope that Emily shows up . The ditransiti ve pattern includes a subj ect , a predicator, an i ndirec t object , and a dir ect obj ect. An indirect object often expresses the recipient role, takes the form of a noun ph rase , and is placed before the direct object. Semantically, the subject in a ditransi tive pattern ‘transfers’ t he di rect ob ject to the indi rect o bject . 2 We wrote h im a postcard . Lucy gave Oscar a new sweater . A complex transitive consists of a subje ct, a predicator, a direct object , and an object predicative . An object predicative a scribes a property to the d ir ect obj ect and is typ ically re aliz ed by a noun ph rase or an adjective phrase.
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