”It grew a day of expectation” : A diachronic corpus study on the evolution of the verb grow in British English

Sammanfattning: English has an extraordinary number of labile verbs, that is, verbs that can be used both transitively with a causative sense and intransitively with an inchoative sense. This corpus-based study investigates the evolution of the verb grow from exclusively intransitive to labile in British English in the Late Modern English period. A random sample of 500 instances of the verb grow was drawn from the period 1710-1780 as well as from the period 1850-1920 of the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts in order to track diachronic changes. The instances in the samples were categorized according to their verb pattern and type of complement (if any), and instances of the past participle grown were also categorized based on the auxiliary used (be/have/none). The study suggests that grow came to be used transitively when resultative intransitive constructions (e.g. be grown (over)) were reanalyzed as passives; that the use of noun phrase complements with copular grow decreased and became archaic to make the distinction between copular and transitive uses less ambiguous; and that the fact that the be-auxiliary was replaced by the have-auxiliary in perfect constructions helped avoid ambiguity between intransitive and transitive uses of grow. Thus, the study provides some empirical evidence for Visser's (1963) hypothesis that the change from be- to have-perfects played a central role in the acquisition of lability.