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

172 Bettelou Los
mainly with ‘light’ verbs (the OE counterparts of PDE come, get, go, keep, let, make,
place, put, set – see Section 3.1 above). 9 In (30) we have the light verb gedon ‘do’:
(30) þu ne miht ænne locc gedon hwitne oððe blacne (Mt (WSCp) 5: 36)
Lat. non potes unum capillum album facere aut nigrum
‘you cannot turn one hair white or black’
A search of typical unergatives (the OE counterparts of verbs like dream, laugh,
sing and work) did not bring up any combinations with predicates. Neither predicates
nor particles, then, are used as creatively as they are in PDE.
Nor does ME yield much evidence of unergative verbs with either a complex
predicate or a particle; neither the Middle English part of the Helsinki Corpus, the
Middle English Dictionary or the OED offer any examples under unergatives like
dream, laugh, sing and work, apart from variations on the idiom laugh NP to scorn
(to hokere, to bismare, til/at/into hething), and the instance in (31) from the OED
and the MED: 10
(31) þey haue an herbe … þat makeþ men laughe hem selue to deþ
(Trevisa Higden (Rolls) I. 305)
We do get instances like (32), but they are probably postpositional rather than true
particle-verbs:
(32) ofte he hire loh to (a1225 (?a1200) Lay. Brut 18542)
often he her laughed to
‘he often laughed at her’ 11
9. Non-light verbs are rarer, but they do exist; e.g., (i), with formian ‘scour’:
(i) formige man þone pytt clæne (Conf 3.1.1, 4.56)
scour one the well cleane
‘scour the well clean, scour out the well’
10. Verbs like sing and work have of course not been dealt with yet in the MED.
11. Example (32) is probably the same construction as the OE example of (i):
(i) þa englas cwædon him to (Gen 19.17)
the angels spoke him to
‘The angels spoke to him’
Structures like (32) and (i) are very reminiscent of complex verbs in Modern Dutch and German
that appear to be postpositions rather than the result of grammaticalized complex predicates.
German examples that ultimately derive from the same pattern are what Blom (2005) has
termed “postpositional particle verbs” like anstarren ‘stare at’, and zulachen ‘smile at’. As German
has preserved its case endings, we can tell from the dative case of the objects of these verbs
that they are the complement of the postposition rather than the object of the particle-verb
combination.