Abstract
The syntactic and semantic properties of the into-causative construction, involving the pattern ‘V NP into V-ing’, has been studied in some detail, but its historical development has received less attention. This paper looks at the historical shifts in the construction with much more representative and robust corpora than have been used for previous studies. Based on nearly 11,440 tokens from more than 950 million words of text, the paper considers several important changes in the lexical, syntactic, and semantic properties of the construction. The study also establishes the value of large, diverse historical corpora and their role in researching syntactic and semantic change.
Acknowledgements
We thank anonymous reviewers of the journal for constructive comments and suggestions which helped us improve the quality of this paper in many respects. The usual disclaimer applies: all the errors and misinterpretations are our sole responsibility. This work was supported under the framework of international cooperation program managed by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2015K2A8A1068295).
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