The Evolution of Agent Prepositions: A Cross-Register Approach

• David Hernández Coalla ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Oviedo
• Localización: Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain / coord. por Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María del Carmen Camus Camus, Jesús Ángel González López, 2022, ISBN 978-84-19024-15-2, págs. 78-84
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro (pdf)
• Resumen

  • This study aims to revisit previous work on the long-neglected topic of the evolution of agent prepositions and address one key question related to it: when did by emerge as the dominant agent preposition? For this purpose, data were extracted from philosophical texts, handbooks and sermons represented in the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus, which allowed to contrast the results here with previous work (Peitsara, 1993). The resulting figures show that register and authorial differences are fairly frequent, making it cumbersome to provide a general answer to the research question and highlighting the need for further research on agent prepositions and their diachrony. However, it is clear that by was already the main agent preposition in Late Middle English, and by the final decades of Early Modern English its use was unrivalled by other alternatives.