영어사에서 타동사 증가를 향한 결합가 변화

Valency Changes towards Increase in Transitivity in the History of English

This paper analyzed valency changes which were derived by a decrease in intransitive verbs and an increase in transitive ones in the history of English. From the OE period a syntactic structure was changed by a lexical verb that determined the number and form of argument, its assignment position with a particular theta-role, and features on the lexical aspect Asp. It means that a diachronic change of lexical verb in use between intransitivity and transitivity triggered the reinterpretation of syntactic-semantic features on the v P-AspP-VP layers. A causative affix - i in OE that was inherited from - j in Germanic derived anticausative or intransitive verbs to function as causative or transitive ones. Other causative affixes like - en , - se and - ø introduced in OE and - ate , - (i)fy and - ise borrowed from Latin and French in Early ME made it possible that anticausative or intransitive verbs came to be used as causative or transitive ones, too. The leveling and loss of inflectional ending of verbs from Late OE via ME to Early ModE rendered labile verbs, or ergative verbs available with a large extent, which brought about the effect that many lexical verbs alternated in valency without any change in their forms. The opacity of morphological varieties also induced the reanalysis of lexical aspect-feature and measure-feature like [±telicity], [±definiteness] and [affectedness], and as a result, almost all of these features have been incorporated onto the light verb v in PDE from on the lexical aspect Asp in OE.