A Diachronic Study of Be Gone

  • 신성균

초록

Since OE through ME, and until EModE, HAVE perfect usually occurs with transitive verbs whereas BE perfect occurs with intransitive verbs (especially, mutative verbs i.e. signifying a change of state or a place and/or verbs of motion). Against the demarcation of the HAVE perfect into two categories, ACTIVITY and UNREALITY by Rydén-Brorström (1987), I suggest that the assumption of the cluster of the syntactic-semantic features, [+BEING], [+STATIVITY] for the BE perfect, the cluster of the opposite syntactic-semantic features, [-BEING], [-STATIVITY], or [+ACTIVITY], [+ITERATION] and [+DURATION] [+UNREALITY] and [+COUNTERFACTUALITY] for the HAVE perfect can explain the BE/HAVE paradigm. Concerning the demise of the BE perfect, counterfactuality proposed by McFadden and Alexiadou (2005) is suggested as the catalyst for the eventual loss of BE. In the first half of ME, counterfactuals categorically required the auxiliary HAVE on the perfect. This requirement was strong enough even to override the otherwise categorical selection of BE by verbs like come, yielding their first appearances with HAVE. My assumption of the feature [±BEING] can explain this. My data (Table I) also shows this in that only 17 cases in King James (1611) and 18 cases in Tyndale (1526) of the BE perfect appear, mainly with the verbs come and go. PE shows a productive use of Be Gone in daily life. One reason for this being that Be Gone has a functional load differently from Be Come, which has no distinctive meaning or function. While he has gone means he is not here, but you may get him easily, but he is gone means separation or farewell, he may not come back again or it is hard to find him. So he is gone may mean in common language he is dead. This kind of functional load prevents contrast loss, so it prevents the loss of the Be Gone. If we use the syntactic-semantic features concerning the pair HAVE Gone vs. Be Gone, HAVE Gone may be featured as [-BEING], [+ACTIVITY] and Be Gone as [+BEING], [+STATIVITY]. HAVE Gone is focused on action or activity whereas Be Gone is focused on stativity or state (that is, being dead or separated). My feature system can also differentiate the demarcation between the pair HAVE Gone vs. Be Gone.

키워드

통시적BE 완료형Be Gone통사-의미적 자질기능적 중요성diachronicBE PerfectBe Gonesyntactic-semantic featurefunctional load
제목
A Diachronic Study of Be Gone
저자
신성균
DOI
10.18853/jjell.2014.56.3.011
발행일
2014-09
유형
Y
저널명
영어영문학연구
56
3
페이지
227 ~ 262