On the development of transitive expletive constructions in the history of English

Abstract

This paper aims to account for the development of transitive expletive constructions (TECs) in the history of English. Having demonstrated that TECs observed in the history of English, especially in Late Middle English and Early Modern English, patterned with those observed in some of the modern Germanic languages, it is argued that the decline of subject clitics in the fourteenth century triggered the change of feature specifications on functional heads, which in turn led to the rise of TECs. Then, the loss of TECs in the sixteenth century is shown to be a direct consequence of the change of clause structure triggered by the loss of ‘rich’ verbal morphology.