Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Particles as grammaticalized complex predicates 171
of the Helsinki Corpus, and becomes even more frequent in the subsequent ones
(Elenbaas 2007: 260). Biber et al. (1999: 932) report that with full noun phrases,
the ‘particle order’ in written registers occurs in over 90% of all cases; in conversation,
the rate is much lower (about 60%), although it is still the most frequent
order. There are many other factors governing the selection of the ‘particle’ or
‘predicate order’, including focus (see also Dehé 2002), end-weight (extraposition
of heavy objects) and idiomaticity (as was discussed in Section 1 above), whereas
the extraposition of genuine syntactic predicates (as in (1d)) appears to be governed
by only one factor, namely end-weight (Biber et al. 1999: 931). In all, the
word order findings appear to tally with the hypothesis that the (1b) order is the
result of grammaticalization. The fact that particle verb combinations with e.g., up
and ut are invariably transparent and spatial in OE (e.g., Denison 1985 & Elenbaas
2007), then, probably means that they are phrases rather than heads. 8
4.2 No predicate quirks in OE and ME?
A typical ‘quirk’ of particles and predicates that we discussed in section 2.3.1 was
that of the ‘unselected object’, a very creative use of the resultative construction
that we saw in (13a–c) where the particle-verb or predicate-verb combination
occurs with an object that could not occur with the verb on its own. No cases of unselected
objects in OE were found, but this is not surprising in view of the fact that
for languages without native speakers we cannot rely on our intuitions of which
objects verbs typically take and which objects are unselected, as we did in the case
of (13a–c) where we know that the objects are unselected because you can’t drink
pubs, frighten daylights, or beat dust. To identify unequivocal unselected objects
in a dead language like OE we have to rely on unergative (i.e., truly intransitive)
verbs that cannot take any object on their own (as PDE work in (13d), which,
though unergative, occurs with an object when there is a particle or predicate present:
he worked out a solution, he worked his fingers to the bone). Unfortunately, OE
particles seem to occur exclusively with unaccusative and transitive verbs, as we
saw in the previous section, and I was not able to identify any cases of particles and
objects occurring with unergative verbs. Unselected objects, then, are not a feature
of OE particle verbs, but, interestingly, they are not a feature of genuine syntactic
predicates in OE either – these, too, occur, as far as I have been able to establish,
8. Non-spatial uses are found with e.g., forth, but here the particle is an event-modifier, and
does not conform to either the LCS in (17) or those in (16):
(i) Peter cnucode forð oð þæt hi hine inn leton
(Hml. Th. i. 396, 34; Wlfst. 222 33)
Peter knocked forth until they him in let
‘Peter kept on knocking until they let him in’
For such event-modifiers, see McIntyre (2001) & Los (2004).