Indo-European linguistics and classical philology
A. A. Eseleva. ‘hi bereafiað hie selfe ðara goda…’ (On Historical Change of English Trivalent Constructions) (pp. 276–288)
Author
A. A. Eseleva (Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences)
Keywords\n Old English, present-day English, trivalent construction, verbs of giving and deprivation
Pages\n 276–288
Summary\n
The paper discusses constructions with trivalent verbs of giving and deprivation in Old English (OE), their historical ways of development and disappearance, and contrastively compares older features of the verbs in question with their descendants in Present-day English. Present-day English makes a distinction between the verbs of giving and deprivation. Alternations with them are classified as Dative Alternation (to give and to sell) and Clear Alternation (to deprive and to bereave) by B. Levin (Levin 1993). These are not merely syntactic differences; the different constructions and alternating properties imply a clear-cut distinction of verbal meanings (cf. Goldberg 1995). In OE, however, the verbs of giving and deprivation despite the opposition of their meanings shared one common ditransitive pattern with the accusative marking on the object of giving / deprivation (henceforth Theme), and dative marking on Recipient / Original Possessor, cf.: Drihten me [Dat] forgeaf ða æhta [Acc] and drihten hi [Acc] me [Dat] eft benam – ‘God gave me these possessions and God took them away from me’ (ÆCHom II, 35 0050 (262.82)) This leads us to a question: what commonalities could have the verbs of giving and the verbs of deprivation had in OE to be allowed under the same syntactic frame? The answer could be found in the semantics of Germanic verbal roots, many of which turn out to associate the meanings of giving and taking (cf. PIE *selh1 ‘take’ → Goth. saljan ‘give’; PIE *ghebh1 ‘seize, take, give’ → Goth. giban ‘give’(LIV 1998); Old Icelandic fá ‘get, give’ (Cleasby et al. 1957)). Since both groups of verbs shared ditransitive pattern in OE, next step for them (in compliance with the general trends in the English language) was to develop a prepositional pattern. The verbs of deprivation were the first to involve prepositions (æt, of) into their overt syntactic structure. Interestingly, the verbs of deprivation in OE allow prepositional marking on both Theme, and Original Possessor. Then, towards the end of the OE period, the verbs of giving are found in a prepositional construction (with prepositions to and into). There is only a small number of prepositional constructions with the verbs of giving found in OE, and in all of them Recipients are very similar. As only inanimate nouns, denoting organizations of people such as church, monastery, (meaning people of these organizations themselves) are used as Recipients of prepositional construction with the verbs of giving, there seems to be a semantic restriction on Recipient in OE. In Middle English animate Recipients start to appear in prepositional construction with the verbs of giving. It is suggested that different prepositions chosen for the verbs of giving and deprivation in prepositional construction added to contrasting the former against the latter on the way from a presumable unity of meanings of the ancient period to modern distinctions.
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