Syntax of the Verb Phrase in Shakespeare’s English

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0 (B), University of Freiburg (English Seminar), 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction

Language is constantly developing. English grammar in the 16 th and early 17 th century is marked more by ...

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0 (B), University of Freiburg (English Seminar), 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction
Language is constantly developing. English grammar in the 16 th and early 17 th century is marked more by the survival of certain forms, constructions and usages that have since disappeared than by any fundamental developments. 1 In this paper I want to demonstrate how the syntax of the verb phrase has changed since Shakespeare’s time.

2. Impersonal verbs and constructions

Today, former impersonal verbs are more often used personally, with a nominative subject. Some of them have become archaic, others are not common in their former construction in Present Day English. There are several reasons for the preference of the use of personal constructions in Modern English. The most important reasons are the loss of inflections in the Middle English period and limited patterns of word order that resulted from that. 2 In some cases Shakespeare had already stopped using the old impersonal construction, others mark the change to the use of personal constructions. Shakespeare used for instance both “I like” and “it likes me”, whereas he only used “he list”, but never the impersonal construction “him list”.