Perspectives on Complementation Structure, Variation and Boundaries
This book presents the latest work in the field of complementation studies. Leading scholars and upcoming researchers in the area approach complementation from various perspectives and different frameworks, such as Cognitive Grammar and construction gramm
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Multiple Sources in Language Change: the Role of Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in the Formation of English ACC-ing Gerundives1 Teresa Fanego University of Santiago de Compostela
9.1
Introduction
This chapter examines the rise of ACC-ing gerundives (ACC-ing for short), as in (1–2), in the light of recent proposals (see Van de Velde et al. 2013, and references therein) on the possible multiplicity of source constructions in language change, with change understood as often involving historically distinct ‘lineages’ merging into a new lineage. (1) COPC 1689 Stevens, Journal, 1Q17 0004/029-P0: The man being an Irishman and a Catholic made his ill carriage towards us appear the more strange, but his religion and country he thought would bear him out.2 (2) COLMOBAENG 1861 Dickens, Great Expectations, 75: I not only prevented him getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here. Like all other gerundives, ACC-ing gerundives have a characteristically nominal distribution, and hence can function as subject (1), object (2), predicative or prepositional complement. However, they differ from other subtypes of gerundives both in their chronology (their emergence in English being comparatively late) and their formal characteristics, in that they have a subject argument either in the ‘common’ case, if it is a full noun phrase (the man in (1)) or in the accusative case, if it is a personal pronoun (him in (2)); hence they contrast both with ‘bare’ gerundives (3), which lack an explicit subject, and with POSS-ing gerundives (4), whose subject argument is marked for the genitive:
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(3) HC 1550–52 Diary of Edward VI, 355: The duches, Crane and his wife [...] were sent to the Towr for devising thies treasons; Jaymes Wingfeld also, for casting out of billes sediciouse. 179
10.1057/9781137450067 - Perspectives on Complementation, Edited by Mikko Höglund, Paul Rickman, Juhani Rudanko and Jukka Havu
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Perspectives on Complementation
In this chapter, I will argue that ACC-ing gerundives, unlike other gerundives, do not emerge from former nominal gerunds through a gradual process of accretion of verbal characteristics, but have developed, rather, as an ‘intersection’ (see Trousdale 2013: 493) of a number of pre-existing constructions, among them absolute participles. The discussion is structured as follows. Section 9.2 gives an overview of the corpus material used in this study. Sections 9.3 and 9.4 offer, respectively, an outline of the development of English gerundives since Old English times, and a brief discussion of some related structures. Section 9.5 focuses specifically on the gerundive subtype (the ACC-ing gerundive), which is the main concern of this chapter, discussing its origins and probable course of development in light of the evidence drawn from the corpora described in section 9.2. Section 9.6 considers this proposed course of development with reference to the analytical framewo
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