ABSTRACT

The present study is concerned with the syntactic and semantic development of the impersonal verb hunger in Early Modern English. An analysis of corpus data has been carried out on ca. 20 million words drawn from EEBOCorp 1.0 (1473–1700). Results show that, from a semantic perspective, the verb hunger undergoes a process of metaphorical extension involving a change from the original meaning ‘to feel hunger’, in the domain of Physical Sensation, to the meaning ‘to desire’, in the domain of Emotion. In this latter sense, the verb becomes predominantly associated with prepositional complements (e.g. 1542, our hungry soules [...] hunger for y^ word of God). Also in the course of the Early Modern period, the verb is subject to competition with the adjectival periphrasis be hungry, especially in the sense ‘to feel hunger’. The article concludes by putting forward hypotheses to explain the motivations for these various developments.

摘要

本研究关注早期现代英语中非人称动词hunger的句法和语义发展。对语料库数据进行了分析。2000 万个单词来自 EEBOCorp 1.0 (1473–1700)。结果表明，从语义的角度来看，动词hunger经历了一个隐喻延伸的过程，包括从物理感觉领域的“感到饥饿”的原始含义到欲望领域的“渴望”的变化。情感。在后一种意义上，动词主要与介词补语相关（例如 1542，我们饥饿的灵魂 [...]). 同样在早期现代时期，动词与形容词的外围短语 be hunger 竞争，尤其是在“感到饥饿”的意义上。文章最后提出假设来解释这些不同发展的动机。