Raisingturn outin Late Modern English

Abstract

AbstractPresent-day Englishturn outis used in several constructions with mirative and evidential overtones. Among these, the raised subject construction and the impersonal construction stand out. The current paper provides a diachronic account of the changes that led to the emergence of these constructions. It examines the semantic and syntactic configuration ofturn outand the mechanisms whereby this verb developed evidential and mirative readings during the Late Modern English period. The record shows thatturn outdeveloped abruptly from a full lexical (predominantly resultative and change-of-state) control verb into a raising verb in the course of the eighteenth century. This change was triggered by a process of semantic generalization and subjectification whereby the verb acquired evidential and, most notably, mirative nuances. Analogy seems to have played an important role as well, since the evidence suggests that other constructions somewhat similar in form (syntactic structural usage) and meaning facilitated this process. The bulk of the data examined in this study were drawn from theOxford English Dictionaryand theCorpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0.