Castro Chao, NoeliaFerrández San Miguel, MaríaNeumann, Claus Peter2024-03-142024-03-142018Castro Chao, N. & Ferrández San Miguel, M. & Neumann, C. P. (eds.). Taking Stock to Look Ahead: Celebrating Forty Years of English Studies in Spain. 1st., Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Zaragoza, 2018. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.26754/uz.978-84-16723-51-5.978-84-16723-51-510.26754/uz.978-84-16723-51-5https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/102234One 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.engImpersonal constructions in Early Modern English: a case study of "like" and "please"book parthttps//doi.org/10.26754/uz.978-84-16723-51-5https://publicaciones.unizar.es/https://puz.unizar.es/https://aedean.org/open access811.111'367.625811.111'361811.111'367811.111-112Construction GrammarImpersonal constructionTransitivityEarly Modern EnglishFilología inglesaLingüística5702 Lingüística Diacrónica5702.01 Lingüística Histórica5705.13 Sintaxis, Análisis Sintáctico