Böcker av Eva (Universitat Hamburg) Berlage

This book explores the semantic-syntactic development of composite predicates (CPs) in English from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Large-scale corpus data reveal that the morphologically and semantically related simple verb (e.g. notice in the case of take notice of) works as a powerful predictor of the CP's semantic evolution.

What makes the noun phrase 'the man I saw' more complex than 'the man'? Designed for researchers and students interested in questions of language complexity, this book aims to answer that question by exploring variation in more than three billion words of British and American data.