Points of modern English usage LXXIV

English Studies

Volumn 79, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 73-81

[No Author Info available]

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0346394042     PISSN: 0013838X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00138389808599114     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. I am grateful to Frits Stuurman for alerting me to Claire Gronemeyer's work and for putting me in touch with her. She has kindly allowed me to use her article: 'On deriving complex polysemy: the grammaticization of get' and to quote from it before publication. She has also answered my queries and commented on the examples.
2. Gronemeyer draws her examples for the early period from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and for the present day from the Brown Corpus.
3. I apologise for the mistyping of got as get in the questions as set out in 'PMEU LXXIII', thus changing the tense. It makes no difference to the point made by the construction however.
4. In the quotation from Klancher's review the word rejecting should read burying. Again, I apologise for the error, which, in this instance, does make some slight difference to the comments received.
5. A somewhat similar sentence, presenting the same type of complication, appeared in The Times recently: 'It is thought that motorists will prefer to use the northern relief road rather than swelter in motorway traffic jams.' The Times, 29 July 1997.
6. Of the total of 53 examples, 24 come from one writer in one book (Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: reading as social practice, 1780-1832, Cambridge University Press, 1994) and these include the doubtful ing form quoted and the two infinitive forms that are not in line with the general trend. The numbers from Richardson are indicated in brackets after the total number in each group.