Q: I'm told

[Cynthia Allen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>> When did constructions like "he's given something"
>> enter the English language?
>
>Just in case this wasn't clear, I was asking about
>raising of IO to Su.
 
I have a whole chapter (chapter 9) in my 1995 Clarendon Press Book 'Case
Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old to Early Middle
English'.  In a nutshell, the first convincing example is from 1375:
Item as for the Parke she is a lowyd (=allowed) Every yere a dere.
This is from the Award of Dower by Sir Thomas Blount
 
This construction appears immediately after the fixing of the order of two
bare NP objects, and my belief about what happened here is that the old
indirect object became reanalysed as simply an object once this happened,
making it available to passivization.
 
 
I devote Appenix A of my book to demonstrating that all the earlier
examples which have been cited in the literature are either dubious or
clearly just mis-analysed.  Unfortunately, Visser is less helpful than
usual here because (a) he got muddled in this section and (b) his dating of
examples is not good because he does not distinguish between revised
versions of earlier texts and the originals, giving only the date of the
original, which often has a different (older) construction from the revised
versions.
 
Cynthia Allen
 
 
 
Cynthia Allen
Linguistics, Arts Faculty
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200
Australia