Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English ed. by Laurel J. Brinton, Minoji Akimoto (review)

humanities 303 not a survival of immemorial Irish tradition, but were a product of the Counter-Reformation. It is unfortunate that, having shrugged off one modern species of nonsense, the author should try to impose on us another. The work is disfigured by a loopy penultimate chapter, arguing on Freudian grounds that the modern holy well cults and rounding rituals were the product of the sublimated anal-erotic obsessions stimulated by subconscious rage at the imposition of Tridentine authority. One can only wonder at the severities of the author's toilet training that make this argument seem plausible. It neglects the many functions of religious ritual, especially the obvious one that these Christians were sorry for their sins. It also rests heavily on symbolic connections between springs and urine and faeces and stones, which are unprovable because they had to remain unconscious . Again, in its very nature, the author has no evidence for the subconscious hostility supposedly created in early modern Ireland by the introduction of Tridentine authority, which then found relief in rounding rituals. Celtic mythology can be refuted by evidence, but it is the beauty of Freudian theory that its proof lies, in its virginal purity, irrefutable in the unconscious. (SHERIDAN GILLEY) Laurel J. Brinton and Minoji Akimoto, editors. Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English John Benjamins. xiv, 284. US $89.00 The history of composite predicates mirrors the history of English itself: a core of native vocabulary, the disappearance of many grammatical inflections , the rise of articles and particles and fixed periphrases. This collection considers two types of composite predicates. A `complex verb' like have an argument comprises a verb like do/give/have/make/take, an article, and a deverbal noun. `Phrasal verbs' like blow up consist of a verb and a particle like up or off or down. These structures challenge non-native speakers: phrasal verbs are notoriously idiomatic, and the distinction between argue and have an argument can be elusive, at least to nonlinguists . Linguists have studied the modern structures' meanings and motivations: complex verbs can be modified and relativized, e.g. they had a terrible argument which lasted all night. And publishers have profited: entire dictionaries dedicated to the phrasal verb tempt (or torment) the learner. However, the history of complex predicates has been, if not neglected, then dispersed B conceptually, temporally, geographically. Phrasal verbs appear in the Middle English volume of the Cambridge History of the English Language under both vocabulary and syntax; the latter chapter describes Kennedy 1920 as `one of the standard works.' 304 letters in canada 1999 Minoji Akimoto and Canadian Laurel J. Brinton make earlier scholarship accessible in their lucid introduction and in the volume's concluding bibliography. And the essays in their collection use modern methods of historical corpus linguistics to chart the forms and syntax and semantics of the complex verb from Old through almost Modern English. Several essays introduce the research of Japanese scholars to a Western audience; others were commissioned from European and North American scholars. There is more Canadian content than might meet the eye: Old English is exhaustively represented by the Toronto Dictionary of Old English corpus, and Toronto's text-analysis program TACT crunches Hiltunen's miscellany of Early Modern literature. Indeed, the corpora are not always comparable: it's problematic to track the relative frequencies of make and have through such different textbases as the entire corpus of extant Old English, some Paston Letters, the generically balanced Helsinki Corpus, and a collection of Early Modern drama selected primarily for its accessibility. The analytic table of contents helpfully highlights other crosschapter variation in topics and methods. The collection is nevertheless coherent: the editors have commissioned chapters on each historical period and a conclusion from an eminent historical syntactician. The chapters track complex predicates against a changing linguistic context. Brinton and Akimoto's groundbreaking account of their OE origins assesses the relevance of written Latin, spoken Scandinavian, and regional and temporal variation. Take is a Norse borrowing; early do-phrases might reflect Latin facere or, in Middle English, French faire. ME linguistic change further favoured these forms. Inflectional loss made it easier to zero-derive the...