A Matter of Style : Stative and Dynamic Predicates

Abstract

Almost every English verb, in context, expresses either a state or an action, and the difference between them may be defined by empirical texts that combine syntax and semantics. Applied to passages from Congreve (1700) and Ben Jonson (1609), these tests give strong if not extensive evidence that eighteenth-century prose is more nominal than early seventeenth-century prose: eighteenth-century authors choose to express meaning in terms of stative relations between nouns, rather than in terms of actions or events. This preference may be considered as a matter of literary style, and perhaps also as an episode in the history of the evolution of modern English.