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Project

Prepositional phrase complements to English mental adjectives: Variation and Change

English mental adjectives (e.g., aware, angry, happy, sure, surprised, etc.) can have their complements marked by a variety of prepositions. For example, angry can combine with prepositional phrase complements (PPCs) headed by about, at, or with, as well as for and over, all potentially marking the external source of the anger. PPCs to English mental adjectives have not been heavily researched. Adopting both the synchronic and diachronic perspectives, this PhD project presents a detailed picture of variation and change in this system.

We first provided a comprehensive and detailed description of the overall system of PPCs to English mental adjectives. Our findings have revealed extensive variation within this system, with most mental adjectives allowing more than one PPC-marker. Additionally, the overall system is changing through time, during which about has been found to strikingly develop into a central marker of PPCs. Based on the results, three follow-up studies have been conducted.

Taking a synchronic perspective, given that variation abounds within the system of PPCs to mental adjectives, we have delved into potential factors that may affect speakers' choice of certain PPCs following mental adjectives. With a case study on the alternation of PPCs marked by about, at, and with complementing the mental adjective angry. It has been found that the syntactic (i.e., predicate types, complement types), semantic (i.e., indications of the intensity, complement animacy), and register (i.e., genre types) factors involved fail to predict the choice of PPCs with high accuracy. Consequently, much variation remains unexplained, suggesting that there is considerable freedom in PPC selection.

Adopting a diachronic perspective, we have explored the rise of about 'outside the envelope of variation' (Aaron 2010: 4). Specifically, we compared the recent histories of about and at, another frequent and productive PPC-marker, more generally. By probing into the semantic profiles of about and at from Early Modern English to the Present-day English, we have found that the general semantic structure of about underwent a marked shift of its prototypical core from spatial senses to more abstract senses, which motivates its expansion as a PPC-marker.

Another diachronic study has probed into the variability in the PPC system and provided an alternative account for variation within the system by analyzing the interaction between isomorphism and the semantic structure of prepositions. By investigating variation in the use of two prepositions, namely at and with, we have found that the sense most prone to competition is arguably the most peripheral. This indicates that peripheral senses are more prone to variation. Surprisingly, we also observed a notable level of competition for the spatial core use of at, potentially linked to its higher levels of fine-grained semantic specialization in marking spatial relations.

Taken together, these findings have illustrated a comprehensive picture of PPCs to English mental adjectives, and provided alternative insights for the understanding of variation and change.

Date:20 Sep 2019 →  15 Dec 2023
Keywords:prepositional phrase complements, variation and change, mental adjectives
Disciplines:Historical linguistics, Corpus linguistics, Linguistics not elsewhere classified
Project type:PhD project