Shall Sweet Bianca Practise How to Bride It? The Role of Dummy Object It in the Diachronic Transitivity Change of Denominal Conversion Verbs

ABSTRACT

In Present-day English, denominal conversion verbs sometimes take it as a dummy object to express an intransitive meaning (e.g. boss it ‘to act as master’). Recent studies suggest that the function of dummy it is to fix a verb’s status and increase its transitivity. In order to test this claim from a historical perspective, this article investigates the diachronic transitivity change of denominal conversion verbs which were recorded with dummy it. A comprehensive survey of the OED data from the sixteenth to the twentieth century will demonstrate that transitivity increase via dummy it is a minor outcome. In fact, the pronoun is associated more often with detransitivisation, for example by occurring with a verb which already has full transitive use. Furthermore, most commonly, the introduction of dummy it does not change a verb’s overall range of transitivity because both intransitive and transitive uses are already available. In this case, dummy it provides an intermediate stage between the two uses. These varied effects of the pronoun may be ascribable to the fact that it is frequently a nonce use and each verb adopted the usage at a different stage of development.

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B), Grant Number 26770174. I am indebted to Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and David Denison for their helpful feedback on early drafts.

Notes

¹ Mondorf (2016: 92) questions whether daunce it in the first clause exemplifies a genuine case of dummy it, since it could refer to a dance, but she considers loke it in the last clause as an ‘unequivocal’ instance.

² The origin of dummy object it has not attained unanimous agreement. The Old English examples quoted in Visser (1963) are questioned by Mondorf (2016: 74, fn. 2) due to the lack of relevant contextual information and, consequently, the difficulty of assessing whether the pronoun is truly non-referential. The OED (s.v. it, pron., adj., and n.¹, 8. a.) refers to some influence from the proform do it (e.g. he tried to swim, but could not do it), but Gardelle (2011: 171) casts doubt on it as the sole contributing factor (see also Mondorf 2016: 93). Instead, Gardelle proposes that the transitive pattern itself is the ultimate source, and the pronoun it is ‘the form that most conveniently applies to an inanimate element which, besides, is not clearly identifiable’ (2011: 174).

³ Rissanen (1999: 261) notes that the spread of the usage from the era of Shakespeare may have been driven by ‘the wish to avoid the use of transitive verbs without an expressed object – a tendency connected with the overall change of English from synthetic to analytic’.

⁴ Likewise, Rissanen (1999: 261) presumes that dummy it helped to make the newly converted verb easily analysable as a verb.

⁵ I am deeply grateful to Philip Durkin, James McCracken, and Kate Wild for dealing with my enquiry and providing this invaluable spreadsheet.

⁶ A few more examples of these and other verbs might have been found in corpora of Modern English, but search would be inefficient as it requires very good tagging to distinguish verbs from nouns. Furthermore, given that denominal conversion verbs are known to be generally rather infrequent and are sometimes apparently hapax legomena, it seems unlikely that the outcome would have been substantially different.

⁷ The availability of examples in the OED, whether or not in the entry of the verb, is a critical factor for selection. In other words, even if previous studies recognise a verb’s appearance with dummy it, the verb was not added to the list if no supporting evidence could be found in the OED, although the number of such verbs is very small.

⁸ ‘Nonce’ in Table 3 excludes verbs whose occurrence with dummy it is a nonce use in more than one meaning (e.g. blackleg it ‘to make a living by swindling or other dishonest practices’ and ‘to return to work before a strike is settled’). This also applies to subsequent tables in the article.

⁹ The exceptions are maiden and versicle, which seem to be hapax legomena.

¹⁰ In the pattern ‘it > trans. > intr.’ subsumed under ‘increase’, the eventual rise of the intransitive use involves decreased transitivity, but the focus here is on the stage immediately after the introduction of dummy it. For the same reason, the pattern ‘it > intr. > trans.’ is listed under ‘decrease’.

¹¹ This table does not merely add up figures in Table 3 to 7 for the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Those five tables focus on the development during one particular century, so any transitivity change which straddled centuries is disregarded. For instance, romance, an intransitive verb which occurred with dummy it as nonce use in the seventeenth century and developed transitive use in the eighteenth century, is treated as a case of ‘intr. > it’ in Table 4 on the seventeenth century but ‘intr. > it > trans.’ in Table 8 on the whole history of denominal conversion verbs with dummy it.