Impersonal constructions in Early Modern English: a case study of "like" and "please"

Abstract

One of the most widely discussed topics in the field of English historical syntax is the so-called impersonal construction. Although traditional accounts generally relate the demise of the impersonal construction to the deep morphosyntactic transformations that took place over the history of the English language, recent investigations have outlined additional hypotheses to account for the cause(s) for its loss. In light of the most recent studies on the topic, this investigation provides a corpus-based analysis of two formerly impersonal verbs, namely "like" (<OE "(ge)līcian") and "please" (<Anglo-Norman "plaiser", "pleser") in the Early Modern English period. Based on data from the "Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English" (1500–1710), this case study aims at offering a diachronic account of the development of these two verbs, with a focus on the range of morphosyntactic patterns documented for each of them.