Verb-adjective combinations in Late Modern English: syntactic reanalysis and analogical generalisation

Verb-adjective combinations are verbs composed of a base verb (e.g. to get, to cut) and an adjective (e.g. clear, short) which exhibit internal cohesion and behave as single lexemes (Quirk et al. 1985; Biber et al. 1999, 2021).Both internal and external fac tors promoted the establishment of verb-adjective combinations, which may be considered as the outcome of the tendency towards analyticity that has affected the English verb system since Old English (OE) and, in a more limited way, continued to the more recent Early Modern English (EModE) period (Brinton 1988, 1996; Brinton and Akimoto 1999; Claridge 2000). The description of the history of verb-adjective combinations in more modern times, however, remains unexplored, as there are no works with a focus on the Late Modern English (LModE) period. The LModE time has often been disregarded from analysis due to its proximity with Present-Day English (PDE), but it warrants examina-tion as the recent past helps understand the effects that processes of change in early periods have on the language used in modern times (Pérez-Guerra et al. 2007; Hundt 2014). This study is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap. The analysis has been undertaken on the Late Modern English-Old Bailey Corpus (LModE-OBC).