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The principal focus of this book concerns various shifts of complements which verbs of implicit negation (e.g. forbid, forbear, avoid, prohibit, and prevent) have experienced in the history of English. Forbid, for example, was once followed by that-clauses, while in contemporary English it is in usual cases followed by to-infinitives except in the fixed form God forbid that … Although a number of English verbs have undergone similar syntactic changes, the paths they have selected in their historical development are not always the same. Unlike forbid, the verb prevent is now followed by gerunds often with the preposition from.

This book describes some of the most representative paths followed by different verbs of implicit negation and reveals the major complement shifts that have occurred throughout the history of English. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students specializing in English linguistics, historical linguistics, and corpus linguistics.