Are There Serial Verb Constructions in Old English? A New Perspective on the Changes in Verbal Complementation

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20420/Phil.Can.2024.683

Keywords:

Old English, Role and Reference Grammar, serial verbs, aspectual verbs, control verbs

Abstract

This article discusses the existence of serial verb constructions in Old English and explores the complementation of aspectual and control verbs as well as other related constructions. The discussion of the Old English data finds remarkable differences with respect to the syntactic configurations of Present-Day English that are described as serial by Roberts (2010). Although the range of serial constructions is more restrictive in Old English, at least with aspectual verbs, the analysis of verbal complementation from the perspective of serialisation allows us to bring other convergent constructions to the discussion, including configurations with linked infinitives and participles in predicative constructions and configurations with pre-modals and the causative verb dōn ‘to do’.

Supporting Agencies

This article is part of a research project funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain [Project code: PID2020-119200GB-100].

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Author Biography

Ana Elvira Ojanguren López, Universidad de La Rioja

Associate Professor in Historical Linguistics and English at the Universidad de La Rioja. She earned her Ph.D. with a thesis about Old English syntax and semantics, which received the Bruce Mitchell Research Award of SELIM. She has been a visiting researcher at the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge, and Sheffield. Ojanguren López has published several articles on Old English syntax, including “The Semantics and Syntax of Old English End Verbs” (ATLANTIS, 2020), “Old English Try Verbs” (Studia Neophilologica, 2021), and “Old English perspectives on the Complement Shift. Toward the desententialisation of self-manipulative verbs” (Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2023). Recent international conferences to which she has contributed include History of the English Language (Poznan, 2021) and Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (Lorient, 2022).

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Published

2024-06-22

How to Cite

Ojanguren López, A. E. (2024). Are There Serial Verb Constructions in Old English? A New Perspective on the Changes in Verbal Complementation. Philologica Canariensia, 30, 393–423. https://doi.org/10.20420/Phil.Can.2024.683

Issue

Vol. 30 (2024)

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Articles

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