Phrasal Verbs and semantic prosody in Late Modern English (1750-1850):a corpus-based study.

The present study aims to describe processes of context-induced reinterpretation affecting the semantic prosody of phrasal verbs (henceforth PVs) during the Late Modern English period (1750–1850). Diachronically, the semantic evolution of PVs has been associated with semantic reanalysis and idiomatization (Akimoto 1999; Rodríguez-Puente 2019; Leone 2023). When approached by adopting a phraseological perspective (Sinclair 1991; Stubbs 2002), the changes that occurred in the period 1750–1850 have been explained “as the effect of a reinterpretation driven by context- specific factors” (Leone 2019: 265). There are no studies examining the role of the lexical environment in the changes affecting the semantic prosody of PVs. The present study is a corpus-based investigation undertaken on the Late Modern English– Old Bailey Corpus (1750–1850), which includes texts taken from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. The analysis reveals that the selected PVs (lock up, take away, throw away) during the period 1750–1850 underwent changes affecting their semantic prosody, driven by context-induced processes, but also conventionalized their extant uses.