That's the traditional explanation, although there's some argument about
the best way to explain how the shift happens. A good, albeit somewhat
technical account is given in chapter 9 of Olga Fischer et al., The
Syntax of Early English.
Regards,
Karl
Gregg Heacock wrote:
> Herbert,
> I raised a question about the possible evolution of usage for "have"
> as in "I have to do this." Might this have developed from "I have this
> to do"? Do you believe Beth Levin's book would cover this? I went to
> Amazon to check out her work. This led me to other works you or others
> may be able to comment upon:
> Argument Realization (Research Surveys in Linguistics)by Beth Levin,
> Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language by Adele
> Goldberg,
> Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure
> (Cognitive Theory of Language and Culture Series) by Adele E. Goldberg
> All of these sound interesting. I am curious to know what you or
> others have to say of these works.
> Much obliged,
> Gregg
>
>
> On Dec 3, 2008, at 11:18 AM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
>
>> From a lexical semantic and syntactic point of view, let me once again
>> recommend Beth Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations (Chicago
>> 1993) as the most detailed published analysis I know of of how meaning
>> and form work together to classify verbs in useful ways. Of course,
>> her overall classification, with about 330 classes, might be a bit
>> much for an undergrad grammar class, but as a reference work and as an
>> introduction to the subtlety and power of the concepts, it's a great
>> piece of scholarship to have on your shelf. And she is pretty much
>> neutral when it comes to theory, at least in this book. You don't
>> have to be a linguist to read it.
>>
>> Herb
>>
>> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
>> Emeritus Professor of English
>> Ball State University
>> Muncie, IN 47306
>> [log in to unmask]
>> ________________________________________
>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
>> [[log in to unmask]]
>> Sent: December 3, 2008 11:52 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Correct?
>>
>> Bruce,
>> If I want a problem to go away or want my refrigerator to fill up,
>> then I don't expect the problem or the refrigerator to do anything.
>> But that only becomes a problem when we want to define the
>> construction in a narrow way. If the construction builds from the
>> ground up, then we need to expect these anomalies in the same way we
>> expect word meanings to grow and change.
>> Is wanting X to Y the same as expecting X to Y? How about
>> encouraging? discouraging? Helping? Ordering? Making? The more
>> abstract the classification pattern, the further it drifts from the
>> real world of meaning.
>> Each of these verbs uses these constructions in unique ways. The
>> patterns build from use, not independently of it.
>>
>> Craig
>>
>> Bruce Despain wrote:
>> Your pattern, “If I say that ‘X V-ed Y to Z’ am I saying that it’s Y
>> who will be doing the Z-ing?” looks like what might be described in a
>> constructional grammar (CG). These folks are averse to describing
>> the relationships of constructions as built up of other
>> constructions. They like to contrast the usage construction meaning
>> vs. the grammatical construction meaning.
>>
>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 7:36 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Re: Correct?
>>
>> Dear All:
>>
>> I suspect that one of the reasons that many modern grammars use what
>> seem to be simplistic structural pattern definitions (e.g. [S V DO
>> INF] for both “We wanted him to be hired” and “We wanted him to go
>> home”) is that the differences among those sentences are differences
>> in what the various participants are doing – the relationships among
>> them – and we don’t really have a theoretically agnostic way of
>> talking about that. The minute a term like “underlying subject” is
>> used, the description is locked into a particular model.
>>
>> This is true of all descriptions, of course (simply by using a label
>> like “infinitive,” I’ve committed to a kind of model), but cases like
>> these bring up major points of contention among current models. Almost
>> everyone who works on English is happy with the term “infinitive,” but
>> there is nowhere near the same level of consensus about the idea that
>> infinitives are really, truly, made out of full sentences, etc. I have
>> a knee-jerk reaction the minute I see a phrase like “underlying
>> subject,” and I’m sure I use phrases that others on the list would
>> have an immediate negative reaction to as well. One way authors of
>> grammar books can try to dodge the entire issue is simply to omit any
>> references to this type of material at all, and thus we end up with [S
>> V DO INF].
>>
>> Older grammars, like the ones Herb mentions, did something that I
>> think we can still do: we can all agree that there are different
>> patterns of relationships among the participants, even if we don’t
>> agree on why those differences exist. To some extent, the differences
>> among the patterns can be “anchored” by relating them to
>> native-speaker reactions to questions about implications of the
>> structure (e.g. “If I say that ‘X V-ed Y to Z’ am I saying that it’s Y
>> who will be doing the Z-ing?”). In other words, we can adopt ways to
>> probe for differences that there will be wide consensus on, even if
>> there is no such consensus on what the differences mean for a theory
>> of linguistic structure (this is what I’m trying to get at with the
>> term “theoretically agnostic”).
>>
>> Bill Spruiell
>> Dept. of English
>> Central Michigan University
>>
>>
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