Impersonal constructions in the history of English form a puzzling category, in that there has been uncertainty as to why some verbs are attested in such constructions while others are not, even though they look almost synonymous. This book tackles this under-discussed question in one of the most popular topics of English historical syntax, with special reference to verbs of emotion in Middle English. Through a careful study of the behaviour of impersonal and near-synonymous non-impersonal verbs, an attempt is made to identify factors that determined the presence, absence, and spread of impers ... More

Impersonal constructions in the history of English form a puzzling category, in that there has been uncertainty as to why some verbs are attested in such constructions while others are not, even though they look almost synonymous. This book tackles this under-discussed question in one of the most popular topics of English historical syntax, with special reference to verbs of emotion in Middle English. Through a careful study of the behaviour of impersonal and near-synonymous non-impersonal verbs, an attempt is made to identify factors that determined the presence, absence, and spread of impersonal usage with the verbs concerned. Full use is made of modern linguistic approaches, including theories and methodologies adopted in the study of psych-verbs in modern languages. The book also effectively draws on categorizations in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary and harnesses the online Middle English Dictionary in a novel way, demonstrating that dictionary materials can tell us about early English syntax and semantics much more than has generally been assumed in the literature. It is concluded that a range of factors such as causation, transitivity, animacy of the Target of Emotion, and duration of the emotion lie behind the choice of impersonal constructions with Middle English verbs of emotion. We can thus make reasonable generalizations about when the usage was licensed in these verbs. Furthermore, boundaries between impersonal and non-impersonal verbs of emotion turn out to have interesting correlations with how emotions are defined and classified in psychology.