Composite Predicates in Late Modern English

This volume provides a concise overview of the diachronic development of composite predicates (CPs) in Late Modern English, offering clearer evidence of ongoing language change using data less readily available in other corpora.

While previous scholarship on CPs exists from a synchronic perspective, this book is the first to focus exclusively on late mordern English with a diachronic approach to CPs, understood as phraseological verbs consisting of a verb and a deverbal noun or this combination with a preposition, such as to ask a question or to take hold of. The volume builds on the work of the Old Bailey Corpus, a valuable historical source of real-life spoken data encompassing the proceedings of the Old Bailey at the Central Criminal Court in London, which predates the invention of audio-recording technology. Leone explores syntactic and semantic changes and the role performed by phenomena associated with grammaticalization, lexicalization and idiomatization in this period from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

The book sheds light on ongoing processes of change in spoken data, enriching knowledge on language change in this period and offering directions for future research. This book will appeal to scholars in English historical linguistics, syntax and semantics, and language change.

Ljubica Leone is postdoctoral fellow at the University of Verona, Italy. She received her PhD in Literacy and Linguistic Studies from the University of Salerno in 2016.