The Great Complement Shift revisited

Abstract

This paper examines the history of the ACC-inggerundive, a subtype of verbal gerund differing formally from both bare gerundives (I enjoyed reading the paper) and POSS-inggerundives (I was surprised atJane’sarriving late) in having an overt subject argument either in the common case, if it is a full noun phrase (Two peopleworrying about each other, with no external diversion, brews a deadly atmosphere) or in the accusative case, if it is a personal pronoun (You can’t preventmetelling the truth). Findings from a corpus-based study show that early instances of ACC-inggerundives most often functioned as preverbal sentential subjects and served as arguments to causative predicates such asbrew,makeandoblige. Based on this evidence, it is argued that ACC-inggerundives have emerged as an intersection of a number of pre-existing constructions, most especially a subtype of absolute participle, now obsolete, that encoded causative (factive) semantics and preceded its superordinate clause. The development of the new gerundive subtype from this participial source, which proceeded as a succession of small discrete steps, can be fruitfully accounted for as a case of constructional change, along the lines proposed in Hilpert (2013) and Traugott & Trousdale (2013).