英語史における動名詞構文の発達

DOI HANDLE

Bibliographic Information

Other Title
  • The Development of Gerund Constructions in the History of English : From Morphology to Syntax

Search this article

Abstract

In this paper, I claim that gerunds did not exist in Old English, and their subsequent appearance is due to the emergent D-system. According to the DP analysis (Abney 1987; Longobardi 1994 among others), Present-day English gerunds are one instantiation of a D-system. I assume that in Old English a functional category D is absent, that is, Old English has only NPs, and the related syntactic phenomena are absent. Hence, the absence of gerunds in Old English follows easily. The ancestors of gerunds did not have verbal properties at all in Old English. That is, -ung, -ing forms were pure nouns syntactically as well as morphologically in Old English. DPs emerged later in order to take over the task of identifying the referentiality of nominals instead of morphological case. The historical development of gerunds is the process by which pure nominal phrases acquire verbal properties. The emergent D within a nominal phrase made it possible.

Journal

Details 詳細情報について

Report a problem

Back to top