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Directional Out Of in the History of English:Grammaticalization and Reanalysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2014

Marion Elenbaas
Marion Elenbaas*
Affiliation:
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
*
Leiden University Centre forLinguistics, P.O. Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden,The Netherlands, [m.b.elenbaas@hum.leidenuniv.nl]
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Abstract

In Present-Day English, the particle out is obligatorilyadjacent to the following of PP, as in He pulled theplugs out of his ears / *He pulled out the plugsof his ears, even though particles can normally precede or followthe object of the particle verb, as in Hepulled out the plugs / Hepulled the plugs out. Interestingly, in Old English and MiddleEnglish, the particle out could occur either adjacent ornonadjacent to the of PP. Based on corpus data covering theperiod from Old English to Late Modern English, I show that the change in thesyntax of directional out of involves grammaticalization: Thebleaching of the directional meaning of the preposition of ledto a structural reanalysis by which the of PP became includedin the particle's phrasal projection and could no longer be separatedfrom the particle out. This in turn led to phono-logicalreduction of the preposition of. The loss of the nonadjacentoption is argued to be connected to the status of particles as optionallyprojecting elements.*

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Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 83 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2014 

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