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Project

The transition from bounded to (partly) unbounded event construal in Middle English.

In this postdoctoral project Peter Petré investigates how a drastic shift in the structuring of narrative in English was the consequence of multiple changes in grammar. Old English grammatical structure (like Dutch) was conducive to narratives in serial fashion, as if seen through the eyes of a protagonist experiencing events as bounded (one after another). This type of construal typically has adverbs meaning then at the head of a clause, often with inversion of the subject (Then looked they for Henrys killer. Then found they him, and then bade he them to surrender). By contrast, Present-Day English grammar provides more room for unbounded narrative, a type of narrative which is similar to a camera overlooking the whole scene, and seeing events as (partly) overlapping (Water was dripping down. The man started digging and the sand is caving in). Until now, it has been assumed that the critical turnover from exclusively bounded to partly unbounded construal occurred in the sixteenth century. However, many of the relevant changes occur already before 1500, among which a sharp drop of adverbs meaning then, loss of inversion, and the rise of verbs meaning begin, start and the progressive (be Xing). The goal of the project is to investigate how these earlier changes interact and to what degree they already instantiate the new, unbounded type.
Date:1 Oct 2011 →  30 Sep 2014
Keywords:Aspect, Syntax, Narrative structure, Middle-English, Historical linguistics, Discourse
Disciplines:Theory and methodology of literary studies