Middle English Verbs of Emotion and Impersonal Constructions

Ayumi Miura is an Assistant Professor at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan. She maintains the website 'HEL on the Web' for students, teachers, and researchers of the history of the English language, her primary field of research.

• Acknowledgements ; Abbreviations ; List of tables ; 1 Introduction ; 1.1 Aims of the book ; 1.2 Definitions of 'impersonals' in previous studies ; 1.3 Issues to be addressed ; 1.4 Outline of the book ; 2 Theoretical and methodological considerations ; 2.1 Positive and negative evidence for studying the syntax of a historical language ; 2.2 Case studies of near-synonymous verbs in early English ; 2.3 Semantic roles: Descriptive adequacy ; 2.4 Event structure of psych-verbs in modern languages ; 2.5 Summary: Organisational framework of the main data analysis ; 3 Verbs of emotion and the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary ; 3.1 Limiting the field of investigation ; 3.2 The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) ; 3.3 Problems with using the HTOED ; 4 Old and Middle English impersonal verbs of emotion: Analysis from dictionary meanings ; 4.1 Initial processes of list-compiling ; 4.2 Pleasure/enjoyment ; 4.3 Mental pain/suffering ; 4.4 Anger ; 4.5 Hatred/enmity ; 4.6 Pity/compassion ; 4.7 Humility ; 4.8 Fear ; 4.9 Summary: Regularities across semantic categories? ; 5 Semantic distinctions between impersonal and non-impersonal verbs of emotion: Evidence from entries in the Middle English Dictionary ; 5.1 Choice of corpora: Using the MED entries as a database ; 5.2 Factors to examine revisited ; 5.3 Verbs of Fear ; 5.4 Verbs of Anger ; 5.5 Verbs of Pity/compassion ; 5.6 Verbs of Humility ; 5.7 Verbs of Hatred/enmity ; 5.8 Verbs of Pleasure/enjoyment ; 5.9 Verbs of Mental pain/suffering ; 5.10 Other verbs of emotion ; 5.11 Summing up ; 6 Concluding remarks ; 6.1 Transitivity of impersonal verbs of emotion revisited ; 6.2 Constellations of properties in diachrony ; 6.3 Correlation with psychological definitions and classifications of 'emotion' ; 6.4 Topics for further research ; References

This book, which undeniably opens up future research perspectives, is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the study of early English verbs advanced students, philologists, and linguists (historical or otherwise) alike.