Reconsidering the history of like

Abstract

The history of the verb like has attracted a good deal of interest among linguists and students of the history of English, from Van der Gaaf (1904) and Jespersen (1927) up to Elmer (1981), Lightfoot (1981), and Fischer and Van der Leek (1983). The interest in this verb is caused by the fact that it presents a clear case of a verb changing its assignment of semantic to syntactic roles. In Modern English (ModE), this verb subcategorizes for a cause, which takes the grammatical role of object, and an experiencer, which plays the role of subject. But in Old English (OE), the semantic roles were assigned to the opposite grammatical roles: It is generally assumed (with an exception to be discussed below), that this change is an instance of syntactic reanalysis. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that no reanalysis of a structure has taken place; rather, a new subcategorization frame has been introduced and gradually ousted the old one.

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