著者

豊田 昌倫

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.47, no.2, pp.239-250, 1971

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In Iris Murdock's novel, A Severed Head, Chaps. 14 and 10, there occur the following sentences: She stared back evenly, unsmiling, but with a candour and a presence more telling than any smile. I gave her back a steady unsmiling stare, and felt pleasure at the idea of surprising her, rewarding her, with my better love. The comparison clearly indicates that the nominal construction, give a stare, and the full verb, stare, are in the 'associative' relationship, or the relationship of opposition, mutually exclusive in a given context. Thus the opposition between the nominal construction, consisting of give (have, make, take, etc.) +a noun, and the full verb, is indeed one of the verbal selective categories, and a speaker or writer is to make a 'binary choice' between the two possible expressions. With an adequate periphrasis, as is often pointed out, the nominal construction is able to meet any situation and is often observed to its advantage in present-day English. In his stimulating System der neuenglischen Syntax Max Deutschbein maintains that a tendency toward 'nominale Ausdruckweise' of English makes itself strongly felt in the sixteenth century, in contrast to Middle English whose 'innere Sprachform' is entirely 'zustandlich' and therewith 'verbal'. However, the analytic construction, which dates from Old English, is not of infrequent occurrence in Middle English and it performs its meaningful function, opposed to the full verb, as is shown by the quotations from Thomas Malory's The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones: ...and ever that knyght made a dolefull complaynte as evir made knyght, and allways he complayned of La Beale Isode, the quene of Cornwayle...(X, 14.) '... so that ye woll kepe my counceyle and lette no creature have knowlech that I shall juste but yourself and suche as ye woll to kepe youre counceyle, my poure person shall [I] jouparte there for youre sake, that peradventure sir Palomydes shall know whan that I com.' (VIII, 9.) though in the case of the combination, make mencion, for instance, the corresponding full verb is really non-existent, thereby the construction being neutralized, so to speak. Apparently the employment of the nominal construction in Middle English is greatly affected by the corresponding French idiomatic usage and a number of constructions are in fact the mere 'calques' of French phrases. Despite Deutschbein's assertion, the nominal construction is thus significantly employed in Middle English, and in the modern period it is often used in preference to the full verb, since the construction is in accordance with the tendency of Modern English to place an operator before the word of higher semantic import.