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

120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Cat.1 Cat.2
Figure 1. Category 1 and Category 2 verbs with the particle up.
Particles as grammaticalized complex predicates 175
are therefore almost exclusively Category 1 verbs, 12 so that these tentative register
findings for EModE cannot be compared to the PDE situation.
With respect to predicates the findings were consistent with the earlier situation
in OE and ME: there were very few genuine syntactic predicates with verbs
other than light verbs (turn, make etc.); I was unable to find any examples of the
more adventurous complex predicates as discussed in Goldberg & Jackendoff
(2004), or Rappaport Hovav & Levin (2001) (see (7) above). Whether it is the size
of the corpus (with over 900,000 words about twice the size of the EModE part of
the Helsinki Corpus), or the authorship (a creative writer taking a syntactic construction
to extremes), the situation is very different in Shakespeare’s plays. Imaginative
examples of various constructions abound. 13 A search for the usual suspects
(the unergative intransitive verbs dream, laugh, sing, work) immediately turns up
genuine syntactic predicates with unergatives like the ones in (39):
(39) CLEOPATRA·
That time, – O times! –
I laugh’d him out of patience; and that night
I laugh’d him into patience; and next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan. (Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, Act II, Sc. v).
12. The particle-verbs shut up, carry out, pick up and point out are the only Category 2 verb combinations
in their list of the phrasal verbs with the highest frequency (Biber et al. 1999: 410).
1 . Example (i), for instance, is an instance of the way-construction (Goldberg 1995):
(i) REGAN
Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell his way to Dover. (Shakespeare, King Lear,
Act III, Sc. vii)
E1
E2
E3