"Long", "lust" and "thirst": the development of impersonal verbs of Desire in Early Modern English from the perspective of Construction Grammar

Abstract

The class of verbs of Desire comprises a few verbs, such as "long", "lust" or "thirst", whose syntax and semantics have undergone important changes in the course of the history of the English language. These three verbs are attested in earlier English as impersonal verbs, that is, verbs occurring in impersonal constructions characterised by the lack of a grammatical subject. Impersonal constructions began to decrease in frequency between 1400 and 1500, and their loss brought about profound changes in the grammar of verbs of Desire. In this paper, I explore the development of "long", "lust" and "thirst" as prepositional verbs in the Early Modem English period (1500-1700), based on corpus data retrieved from "EEBOCorp 1.0". Results show that, after the general loss of impersonal pattems, NP complements were superseded by prepositional complements. Within the framework of Construction Grammar, this finding may be interpreted as the result of a semantic mismatch between lexical and constructional meaning.