The particle forth during the Early Modern English period: linguistic interferences with the particles on and out.

Phrasal verbs formed with forth spread within the linguistic system up to the Early Modern English (EModE) period when they started to decrease in use as a result of internal mechanisms of change and linguistic competition with other particles such as on and out (Brinton 1988; Hiltunen 1994; Akimoto 2006; Thim 2006; De Smet 2010). Despite widespread knowledge, no studies have examined quantitatively the single steps forth followed over the years or questioned the role performed by productivity and processes of semantic specialisation of single instances in the processes of replacement. The present study is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap. The study has been undertaken on the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED), which is a multi-genre corpus covering the EModE period and, specifically, the years 1560–1760 (Kytö & Walker 2006). The analysis proves that the particle forth shows limited productivity, which created the conditions for processes of interference and replacement. The lexical context favoured the semantic specialisation of the particles on and out which stimulated the retraction of forth.