Diachronic Studies of English Complementation Patterns: Eighteenth Century Evidence in Tracing the Development of Verbs and Adjectives Selecting Prepositions and Complement Clauses

Diachronic Studies of English Complementation Patterns offers original analysis of change and continuity of predicates selecting central prepositions and complement clauses over the last three centuries using authentic data drawn from a unique combination of authoritative resources. Juhani Rudanko examines some of the most central prepositions in English; to, in, at, on/upon, and with, in constructions using an -ing clause. He depicts the common constructions used with the prepositions, focusing on matrix adjectives, matrix verbs, and in the case of to, the issue of alternation related to the infinitival pattern. He also provides a systematization of matrix verbs governing the pattern of eighteenth century English in each case. Then Rudanko focuses on the later development of the verbs identified by comparing the eighteenth century usage with present-day English. He draws on many sources for guidance on usage in each period along with the Oxford English Dictionary and H. Poutsma's unpublished dictionary which were sources throughout. For present-day English, he uses the intuitions of native speakers, along with the British National Corpus, and the COBUILD Direct Corpus. His source for nineteenth century examples is the Corpus of Nineteenth Century English. For the eighteenth century, he used the Chadwyck-Healy Corpus and the Century of Prose Corpus.

Juhani Rudanko is Professor of English at the University of Tampere, Finland and the author of Change and Continuity in the English Language (University Press of America, 1998).