Berta Escura Manrique

Universitat Jaume I de Castellón

Phrasal and prepositional verbs in Ancrene Wisse

This paper focuses on phrasal and prepositional verbs in Early Middle English. Our purpose is to analyse these verbal constructions and, in more detail, the prepositional stranding phenomenon deriving from them. The examples in the paper come from the Ancrene Wisse which according to E.J. Dobson (1976: 15)“ is to be dated 1215-20 or perhaps a little later.” Although their remoteness in time, the examples follow the same distributional behaviour as any other example of today. Though originally thought to explain the distributional behaviour of these verbal constructions in Present-Day English, Sroka’s theorem (1975) is equally valid for the examples drawn from Ancrene Wisse. They fit into Sroka’s distributional positions, namely positions a), b), and c), and the exceptions to position a). The final objective of this paper is to observe these facts and to turn this initial study into a wider goal towards other related fields of research.