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Part of
Explorations in English Historical Syntax
Edited by Hubert Cuyckens, Hendrik De Smet, Liesbet Heyvaert and Charlotte Maekelberghe
[Studies in Language Companion Series 198] 2018
► pp. 159–178

Chapter 6
Semantic and lexical shifts with the “into-causative” construction in American English

| Brigham Young University
| Kyung-Hee University

In this paper, we consider several lexical and semantic shifts with the “into-causative” construction (e.g. Sue talked them into leaving) in American English since the early 1800s. The study is based on more than 11,000 tokens (including 680 different matrix verbs) in several large corpora, including COHA, COCA, TIME, and GloWbE. We consider overall changes in the semantic classes of verbs that can be used in the construction (e.g. verbs of force, persuasion, trickery). We then look in some detail at changes with “neutral” verbs (e.g. lead) and “positive” verbs (e.g. encourage), “indirect causation” and a hybrid construction involving the way construction.

Keywords: corpus, causative, into, American English, lexical, semantic, diachronic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
  • 3.Corpus data
  • 4.Lexical diversity
  • 5.Semantic changes: Some generalizations
  • 6.Neutral verbs
  • 7.Positive verbs
  • 8.Indirect causation
  • 9.Interaction with the “way” construction
  • 10.Conclusion, and a final note on corpus size
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.198.07dav
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