Abstract
This study examines composite predicates (CPs) in the history of American English and uses an exemplar-based model to explain changes in the frequency of verb–noun pairings over time. Two different types of verb-nominal CPs are considered, including those liketake a look, in which a light verb occurs with an abstract nominal object, and others likelose sight, with a more lexically specific verb. Using a corpus of texts written between 1820 and 2009, I track the frequency of different CPs and analyze several families of semantically related nouns that occur with the same verb (e.g.take a look,peak, etc.). Representative families are analyzed to determine the presence of highly frequent verb–noun pairings, or exemplars, that separate themselves over time. The success of exemplars is evaluated according to several factors that may shape patterns of use, including the relative size of noun families, the frequency band of tokens of each family and the distribution of tokens across types within a family. Results indicate that the two types of CPs differ with respect to the evolution and success of exemplary verb–noun pairings and indicate that frequency bands play a role while the size of the noun family and their distributional patterns do not.
Highlights
This study is a corpus-based analysis of multi-word verbal expressions known as composite predicates (CPs) and their historical development in American English from the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century
This study examines verb–noun pairings in CPs in a subcorpus of the larger Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, Davies 2010)
Data reveal that lose-sight CPs follow a different pattern: other than a few isolated high-frequency combinations with bear or lose, there are no high-frequency pairings that consistently increase in token frequency and function as successful exemplars that could be the basis for analogy over a long period of time
Summary
This study is a corpus-based analysis of multi-word verbal expressions known as composite predicates (CPs) and their historical development in American English from the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. CPs with light verbs and those with more lexically specific verbs generally share a number of characteristics but differ in several important ways, including varying degrees of idiomaticity and syntactic flexibility (Brinton 2008: 34). As a point of departure in the discussion on exemplars, I focus on the differences between types of verbs in CPs, comparing those with light verbs like make or take with those that contain more lexically specific verbs like bear and lose. Allerton (2003: 187–91) includes verbs of medium token frequency (e.g. feel, find, grant) and low frequency (e.g. add, lodge, launch), alongside the high-frequency light verbs Whether or not both light and heavier verbs should be categorized together, all of these verbs share characteristics of being relatively polysemous and occurring with a variety of NPs that carry the essential meaning of an action or event. In terms of the NP complement, many CPs include deverbal nouns (e.g. take a walk) or nouns that are derivationally related to a verb (e.g. make a decision) or other nouns that, as Quirk et al (1985: 751) point out, share the characteristic that the NP complement contributes to the essential meaning of the CP (e.g. make an effort).
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