Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2017
Abstract
Drawing upon data from Penn-Helsinki parsed corpora and the Old Bailey Corpus, this paper attempts to describe the shifts in the properties of the so-called tough- or easy-to-please constructions (TCs) between the Middle and Late Modern English period. The focus is placed on the changing inventory of adjectival predicates, the form of infinitival complements, the presence of phenomena such as preposition stranding, and on the complexity and information structure of the subject constituents.