LINGUIST List > Publications > Academic Papers > Paper Details

Publishing Partner:

Cambridge University Press

Publisher Login

More Info

New from Cambridge University Press!

From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

Write better papers faster with Questia!

Academic Paper

Title:	At the Interface of Grammaticalisation and Lexicalisation: The Case of Take Prisoner
Author:	Eva Berlage
Institution:	Universität Hamburg
Linguistic Field:	Semantics
Subject Language:	English
Abstract:	Brinton & Traugott (2005) and Brinton (2008) have suggested that light verb constructions of the type take a look (at) are instances of grammaticalisation. This article shows that this is because the emphasis has been on the verb take. Exploring the light verb construction take prisoner, we see that one and the same construction involves both lexicalisation and grammaticalisation processes. For grammaticalisation, the focus will be on the semantic bleaching of take and the productivity of the pattern take + NP. For the lexicalisation of the construction, we will focus on the increasing fixedness of the collocation take prisoner, evident from the decreasing acceptability of the pattern make prisoner, and on the decategorialisation of the original NP prisoner, which is manifested in the loss of plural -s inflection in prisoner. The article further investigates the decategorialisation of prisoner, revealing that the word order of prisoner(s) relative to its complement NP (e.g. take the men prisoner(s) vs take prisoner(s) the men) has a considerable effect on the speed of plural s-deletion.

	This article appears in English Language and Linguistics Vol. 16, Issue 1, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .

Back Add a new paper Return to Academic Papers main page Return to Directory of Linguists main page