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Developments in English Historical Morpho-Syntax
Edited by Claudia Claridge and Birte Bös
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 346] 2019
► pp. 175–198

Conservatism or the influence of the semantics of motion situation in the choice of perfect auxiliaries in Jane Austen’s letters and novels

The present study focuses on the analysis of the choice of either be or have in combination with the past participles of eleven motion verbs (arrive, become, come, enter, fall, go, get, grow, pass, return and run) to form perfective structures in Jane Austen’s letters and novels. She has previously been considered conservative in her grammar, specifically in relation to her preference for be as opposed to have in this type of structure. A corpus-based study shows that although she could indeed be considered conservative, the option of the auxiliary might also have been motivated by the different components of the motion situation involved in each instance. The conclusions show that some tendencies can be observed in relation to the behaviour of some of these verbs, despite the low number of occurrences of some of the verbs included in the analysis.

Keywords: perfect, auxiliary, motion verbs, cognitive approach, stylistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Previous studies
    • 1.2The present study
    • 1.3Basic motion situation
    • 1.4Hypotheses
  • 2.Method
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Motion situations in Jane Austen's letters
    • 3.2Motion situations in Jane Austen’s novels
  • 4.Letters versus novels
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 27 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.346.09cor
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