A Corpus-based Diachronic and Cross-linguistic Study of the Distribution and Licensing of Nouns

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On the basis of data retrieved from various kinds of English historical corpora, the present research discusses the distribution and licensing of noun phrases in the history of English. It is argued that word order variation in Theme passives and expletive passive constructions is dependent on case-hierarchy, information structure, and different syntactic configurations. It is also proposed that two different historical changes of dative-marked noun phrases can be attributed to the difference in type of dative assigned to noun phrases in Experiencer constructions and double object constructions. In addition, it is claimed that Case Filter--noun phrases must be case-marked--plays an important role in explaining diachronic changes of noun phrases as well as the synchronic distribution and licensing of noun phrases in English.