Paper

Emerging English Transitives over the Last Two Centuries

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Abstract

We analyze an automatically-parsed British Hansard to identify approximately 200 verbs that first appeared in transitive constructions in British English in the 19th and 20th centuries. We use this list of verbs to test two hypotheses about new verb forms. First, we test the hypothesis that rarer verb lemmas are more likely to experience language change compared to more common verb lemmas. As measured by our specific notion of language change, we find that this is true only up to a certain rarity, and extremely rare lemmas are actually less likely to change compared to somewhat rare lemmas. Second, for new transitive verbs, we test the hypothesis that the passive construction is introduced later than its active counterpart. We find some evidence for this hypothesis but show that it is not universally true by exhibiting several verbs whose active and passive usages were introduced simultaneously.

Keywords: transitive verbs, English, language change, statistical modeling, passivization, frequency hypothesis

How to Cite:

Hou, L. & Smith, D., (2021) “Emerging English Transitives over the Last Two Centuries”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 4(1), 71-80. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/9bxf-tr14