Pronominal vs. nominal forms of direct object in Late Modern
through Present-day English
Meiji University/Reijirou Shibasaki
1. More thoughts on (in)transitivity: An introduction
Transitivity has attracted the attention of researchers for about half a century, with its nature being examinedmostly within the range of transitive clauses (Hopper and Thompson 1980). In the last two decades, the study oftransitivity began to be readdressed from the perspective of intransitivity in conversation (Thompson and Hopper
2001), which provides fresh insights into the discourse-pragmatic correlates of grammar with (in)transitivity. This
study is one of the papers given at the international symposium: More thoughts on (in)transitivity and related issues
in the history of English (The 92nd Annual Conference of English Literary Society of Japan (ELSJ-92) WebConference), organized by the present author, in cooperation with Takuto Watanabe, Jerzy Nykiel, Fuyo Osawa andYoshitaka Kozuka. We traced the history of (in)transitivity from Present-day English (PDE) to Old English (OE)on several issues.
2. Increase in pronominal forms and formulaic expressions
This study examined the vicissitude of pronominal/nominal forms of direct object in Late Modern English(LModE) through PDE, with a focus on the two typical transitive verbs, i.e. kill and break. The data used for thisstudy were all from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, 1810s-2000s), especially both past tense andpresent/past perfect forms that denote a completed action.
The survey results tell us that these two verbs have a strong tendency to co-occur with pronominal objects. In
the case of kill, (have/had) killed him is found to be by far the most frequently used sequential expressions as in (1);other related expressions such as (have/had) killed her/himself/me/you/it/one/etc. can be considered to havedeveloped in clusters by analogy with (have/had) killed him over time.
(1) “They killed him in the War, I guess. Yes, that’s what happened to him.” (1936 The home place: FIC, COHA)
Interestingly, the past tense form is preferred across time in terms of frequency, which implies that in American
English, past tense forms can be used where perfect forms are traditionally used (see Otsu 2019 for details; cf. Elsness1997).
On the other hand, some of the most frequently used sequential expressions with break, e.g. broke the ice, broke
the silence (of something) and broke the news, might have been conventionalized as formulaic forms; transitivity may
be lower despite their full nominal forms. In addition, such examples as break it (off/up)/in two/in(to)pieces/down/open/in half/etc. may imply that break can often be used as low transitive verbal chunks or formulaic
expressions, as in (2); broke it was the most frequent usage in this survey.1 All in all, even typical transitive verbs
such as kill and break turned out to be intransitive-oriented over time.
(2) Chick caught his hold, but the Senestro broke it almost instantly. (1951 BlindSpot: FIC, COHA)
3. Intransitive-oriented over history
Building on the investigation results, I argue that the strong preference of pronominal forms over nominal onesin verbal expressions with kill reflects the lower degree of transitivity (cf. Thompson and Hopper 2001 and Shibasaki2010). Pronominal forms indicate referentially a shorter distance from the last mention; information retrievablefrom the immediate context (i.e. recency-of-mention effect) may have enabled the increasing rate of pronominalforms, which may be compatible with what Halliday (1994: 179) calls ‘clause by exchange’ in interpersonalcommunication. Forms of reference salient enough in discourse can be realized as forms of less phonetic substance,
subsequently giving rise to ‘object deletion’ (Thompson and Hopper 2001). The other verb break tends to co-occur
with nominal objects; however, the majority of its high-frequent expressions can be regarded as formulaic expressions

that have some bearing on the lower degree of transitivity, which lends support to some seminal studies inintransitivity on PDE (Kärkkäien 1996; Thompson and Hopper 2001).

3. Implications for future studies
Omission of direct objects, which is not addressed but implied in this study, can be a good topic for my future
study; since salient items in discourse are often used as pronominal forms, they can be elided so long as speakers canretrieve relevant information from the immediate discourse, regardless of whether they are grammatical subjects orobjects (Givón 1990: 905). In this line of reasoning, Parviainen (2019) investigates the omission of direct objectsof transitive verbs in nine varieties of English, i.e. Fiji, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Kenya, the Philippines, Singapore,
Great Britain and the United States, from the International Corpus of English. She concludes that while objectomission can be seen most frequently in both Indian and Singapore English, it is not found in British and American
English (i.e. ‘parental varieties’). Whether the increasing degree of object omission can be witnessed in the historyof British or American English will promote a better understanding of the transition of (in)transitivity.
Acknowledgements
This study is part of a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) project (Pl: Reijirou Shibasaki, No. 19K00693), by
the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, i.e. KAKENHI.
Notes
1. As is often pointed out in works on LModE (e.g. Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2009: 85), past tense forms are used asa part of perfect constructions as follows. This may be one of the reasons why the form broke is frequently witnessed
in LModE through PDE instead of its past participle form broken.
(i) England has broke the treaty of amity and commerce, made by our glorious Washington;(1815 The Fair Americans: FIC, COHA)
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