The Early English Impersonal Construction aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today. The impersonal construction has been a topic of extensive research for over a hundred years. But three quandaries-their seemingly unsystematic development, the gradual loss of impersonal uses, and the difficulty of aligning this with structural changes in early English-have made explanations for their development unsatisfactory.
The development of phrasal verbs in British English from 1650 to 1990: A corpus-based study
This dissertation tackles some of these and other questions concerning the nature of phrasal verbs. On the one hand, I intend to delimit the concept of phrasal verb as conceived of in PDE. On the other hand, I aim at filling a gap in literature of phrasal verbs by carrying out a corpus analysis of the development of these structures in the most recent history of English, more precisely between 1650 and 1990. The third aim of the present dissertation is to establish a relationship between these structures and the processes of grammaticalization, lexicalization and idiomatization.
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“Phrasal verbs” are two word verbs with meaning beyond the individual words. Generally a verb and a preposition, meanings can vary even when the verb is the same.
