WANT in American Voyage Narratives in the Early 19th Century: A Corpus-based Approach

WANT in American Voyage Narratives in the Early 19th Century: A Corpus-based Approach

The English verb WANT, which has a vast use in our daily lives, has undergone dramatic changes semantically and syntactically over time. This paper investigated from a construction grammar perspective the semantic and syntactic use of WANT in American voyage narratives in the early 19th century to discover patterns of usage differences, particularly between nonfiction and fiction. It also examined differing the co-occurrence preferences between WANT and constructions in which WANT filled a slot, utilizing a collostuctional analysis method. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses have been implemented. It was found that there were semantic and syntactic differences in the use of WANT between nonfiction and fiction. Nonfiction showed significantly more use of WANT than did fictional works, and more nominal use (meaning either ‘lack’ or ‘lack/need’) than verbal use (meaning ‘need/desire’). As usage of the noun WANT declined in fiction, the verb WANT increased accompanying semantic change from ‘lack’ to ‘need/desire’. The progressive BE want+ing form occurred in the intransitive pattern in both nonfiction and fiction. WANT was strongly associated with the idiomatic expressions of in want (of) and for (the) want of in nonfiction. Occurrences of these constructions were scarce in fiction as the nominal use of WANT declined. (200 words)