Startseite Go to church or die in prison: PPs with bare institutional nouns in the history of English
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Go to church or die in prison: PPs with bare institutional nouns in the history of English

  • Lotte Sommerer ORCID logo EMAIL logo und Eva Zehentner ORCID logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 24. Februar 2025
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Abstract

This paper traces the diachronic development of prepositional phrases (PPs) with bare institutional/location nouns (e.g. go to church, stay in bed, die in prison) from Middle English to Late Modern English. Based on a dataset of 2,249 instances extracted from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCME2, PPCEME, PPCMBE2), we investigate changes in the usage of these constructions (i.e. formal and functional features). One question addressed is why a definite determiner is apparently ‘missing’ in these constructions (died in prison rather than died in the prison) and what kind of semantic interpretation this lack of overt definiteness marking triggers. Moreover, we assess whether there is evidence of these PPs becoming increasingly integrated into the extended verb phrase, by zooming in on the patterns’ semantic functions and formal features. By using collostructional analyses as well as by fitting a conditional random forest model, we show that different constructional types can be identified, which differ regarding the association strength between the elements involved as well as regarding their preferred semantic function, among other things. These results are then discussed from a usage-based, cognitive constructional perspective, indicating that the constructions at hand force us to revisit traditional assumptions about phrase structure boundaries and compositionality.


Corresponding author: Lotte Sommerer, Department of English, American, and Romance Studies, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Bismarckstraße 1, 91054 Erlangen, Germany, E-mail:

Appendix: Investigated location nouns

  1. barbican

  2. barn

  3. base

  4. bay

  5. bed

  6. board

  7. bureau

  8. camp

  9. chamber

  10. chapel

  11. childbed

  12. church

  13. class

  14. club

  15. college

  16. country

  17. court

  18. cowpasture

  19. crib

  20. deck

  21. dunghill

  22. earth

  23. field

  24. gallery

  25. gaol

  26. glen

  27. government

  28. grammarschool

  29. hall

  30. harbour

  31. haven

  32. heaven

  33. hell

  34. hill

  35. home

  36. hospital

  37. house

  38. household

  39. lake

  40. land

  41. market

  42. mass

  43. parliament

  44. place

  45. port

  46. prison

  47. qualmhouse

  48. sanctuary

  49. school

  50. sea

  51. ship

  52. shipboard

  53. shore

  54. stage

  55. street

  56. synagogue

  57. throne

  58. town

  59. valley

  60. ward

  61. warehouse

  62. world

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Received: 2024-01-22
Accepted: 2024-07-02
Published Online: 2025-02-24
Published in Print: 2025-11-25

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