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A history of English evidential verbs of appearance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2007

NIKOLAS GISBORNE  and
JASPER HOLMES
NIKOLAS GISBORNE
Affiliation:
Linguistics and English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 14 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LN, UKn.gisborne@ed.ac.uk
JASPER HOLMES
Affiliation:
The Centre for English Language Teacher Education, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UKJ.W.Holmes@warwick.ac.uk
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Abstract

In this corpus-based article we explore the development of evidential meanings in English verbs of appearance, together with their acquisition of evaluative meanings. We explore the relationship of these semantic changes to the question of whether there is an increase in subjectivity diachronically, and we show that subjectivity is orthogonal to both develop-ments: an increase in subjectivity appears rather to go with the spread of small clause constructions.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 1 - 29
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2007

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Footnotes

Thanks to audiences at the Universities of Hong Kong and Newcastle, the 13th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Philip Miller, and two referees for ELL for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. All remaining errors are the authors'. Gisborne gratefully acknowledges funding from the AHRC for a term's matching leave which made it possible to complete this work.