Investigating multi-word verbs in spoken late modern english: evidence from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (1750-1850)

Abstract

The present study examines the development of multi-word verbs (MWVs), namely phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs and phrasal-prepositional verbs in the Late Modern English (LModE) period over the years from 1750 to 1850. The main aim is to investigate the changes which occurred in the spoken language drawing on a selection of texts taken from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's Central Criminal Court. From a diachronic perspective, the emergence and the loss of these verbs can be attributed to the grammaticalization and/or lexicalization of the non-verbal element as well as to different structural analyses by speakers (Brinton & Akimoto 1999: 9-18; Brinton & Traugott 2005: 122-129). In fact, MWVs are all representative of the ‘analytic drift’ that occurred in English (Thim 2012: 38; cf. Brinton & Akimoto 1999) in its diachronic development and can be considered as the outcome of a process that, since the Old English (OE) period, has gradually led to the substitution of single verbs with periphrastic expressions (Denison 1981; Brinton 1988). Moreover, these new forms have, in some cases, undergone further changes that caused the acquisition of opaque meaning due to the process of idiomatization (Kennedy 1920; Brinton & Akimoto 1999; Rodríguez-Puente 2013). This study is a corpus-based investigation conducted on the Late Modern English-Old Bailey Corpus (LModE-OBC), a corpus that has been compiled with texts from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and annotated with the Visual Interactive Syntax Learning interface (VISL). [edited by Author]