An approach to diachronic verb typology

OLIVER JOSE MARIA

San Antonio

Conferencia; 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics; 2017

University of Texas at San Antonio

From the semantic-syntactic framework proposed by Jaume Mateu i Fontanals (2000, 2002), we consider argument structure, as defined in terms of relational-semantic construals, to be an essential component, indeed the primary one, of any morphosyntactic derivation. These construals can be represented by means of relational-semantic tree diagrams, which render visible the way the arguments are related to one another by means of a number of primitive predicates encoding relations such as cause, telicity (i.e. change and state) and direction (i.e. terminal and central coincidence). Thus, taking into account that a whole verb typology can be derived from this framework, this paper aims to extend these theoretical principles to a number of phenomena in Early Modern English. Special attention is dedicated to the behaviour, in morphosyntactic contexts found in the original Elizabethan English version of Shakespeare?s works, of verbs which are classified in Present-day English as unaccusative, ergative, unergative and transitive. The phenomena included here account for the fact that Early Modern English resembles Spanish in certain respects, while it also differs from the way certain Present-day English verbs behave. Ultimately, this paper presents the analysis and the theoretical framework used as valuable tools to be included not only in synchronic descriptions, but also in diachronic studies, which aim to shed light on the nature of semantic-syntactic change