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

176 Bettelou Los
It seems, then, that the more striking parallels between predicates and particles
that can be gleaned from Goldberg & Jackendoff (2004), particularly the phenomenon
of the unselected object, are only in evidence from EModE onwards. Lipka
(1972) states that not all languages that have particle verb combinations have deadjectival
and denominal verbs; some, like Japanese, only have deverbal verbs, and
OE seems similar in having only verbs that are attested as verbs independently,
i.e., also as a ‘simplex’; it is one of the peculiarities of PE (and the modern West-
Germanic languages in general) that many particle verbs have no simplex (e.g.,
peter out, brazen out, pretty up and many others). It looks as if English was more
like Japanese in this respect in earlier times, as it is not until EModE that we start
to find unergatives, manner of motion verbs, denominal and deadjectival verbs in
any large numbers.
Talmy (1985) has proposed a binary typology along the dimension path-
expressions. There are, he claims, verb-framed languages and satellite-framed
languages; the former describes paths by a ‘path’ verb like exit while the latter
describes paths by an element associated with the verb, like a particle or prefix;
this explains why some languages have particle or prefix verbs and others do
not. Slobin (2005, 2006) argues that satellite-framed languages typically have
many more types of manner verbs than verb-framed languages, and that there
may well be a diachronic dimension: because ‘manner’ is so easily encoded in
these languages, there is “over time – a predisposition to attend to this domain”
(Slobin 2005: 316). The more fine-grained the distinctions become, the more
learners are geared to making these fine distinctions, which ultimately leads to
impressive lists for, say, “types of rapid bipedal motion” like run, jog, lope, sprint,
dash, rush, hurry, scurry, scramble etc. (Slobin 2005: 316). A count of innovative
manner of motion verbs per century, based on the OED, seems to show an
increase from 1500 onwards, but such results are difficult to interpret correctly
because English was so intensely relexified (see Slobin 2006: 72). Manner of motion
verbs are a good fit in an LCS like (17), and lead to expressive particle-verbs;
they may account to some degree for the marked difference between the ME and
the EModE periods. Although the origin of the rising popularity of the other
Category 2 verbs seems less clear, many of them also encode ‘manner’, as we
discussed in Section 3.1, and are consequently good fits in the LCS. It is this that
may hold the key to their appearance in EModE.
5. Conclusion
The semantic and syntactic similarities of complex predicates and particles point
to a common origin, with particles having grammaticalized from phrase to head.