Diachronic Studies of English Complementation Patterns: Eighteenth Century Evidence in Tracing the Development of Verbs and Adjectives Selecting Prepositions and Complement Clauses (review)

This book covers more than a decade of work in which Rudanko explores the development of complementation in English, especially clausal complements governed by prepositions. Specifically, R is interested here in ‘explicating different grammatical constructions selected by individual verbs and adjectives’ (4). Those who are interested in the details of the recent history of English will conclude that R is, on the whole, quite successful in his attempt to show ‘how an important area of the system of English predicate complementation has evolved over the last three centuries’ (5).

In Ch. 1, R discusses the problems of obtaining and evaluating data in diachronic studies. Lacking native-speaker intuitions from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, R chooses to rely on several established corpora. For present-day English, R consults the British National Corpus (ca. 100 million words) and the COBUILD Direct Demonstration Corpus (50 million words). To study how modern constructions have evolved, R uses the Chadwyck-Healey corpus of eighteenth century fiction. For the nineteenth century, he uses the Century of Prose Corpus. R also had access to the Corpus of Nineteenth Century English, currently being compiled by himself and Merja Kytö at the University of Uppsala. R also acknowledges a debt to the OED, and finally, he refers often to Poutsma’s unpublished dictionary.

Ch. 2 begins by distinguishing the to-infinitive construction from to-ing, which is R’s main interest here. In particular, R lays out which types of adjectives select to-infinitive constructions and which select to-ing. The seven adjectives R examines have varied as to which complement each has selected over the past 300 years. For the most part, there has been a change toward the to-ing pattern.

Ch. 3 focuses on the in-ing patterns. Ch. 4 examines at-ing constructions. With this construction, as with the in-ing pattern, R notes that while he wishes to focus on complement structures and exclude adverbial or adjunct structures, in practice this is a difficult distinction to maintain when dealing with diachronic material. Ch. 5 examines on-ing, while ch. 6 treats with-ing, perhaps one of the most interesting constructions that R studies here. Ch. 7 sums up this tightly packed monograph.

R’s extensive bibliography alone will make the book a valuable addition to the library concerned with the details of the diachronic study of English syntax. But it is the close study, extensive observation, and the insights of one who has long studied the language that make this such a worthwhile book.