---
title: "The Development of long in Early Modern English: Impersonal"
description: "This article tracks how the English verb long (from OE langian ), a verb of Desire in Levin's (1993) classification, changed its… 46 references."
authors: ["Noelia Castro-Chao"]
year: 2021
venue: "Atlantis 43"
source: "https://www.atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/article/view/720"
doi: "10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.07"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Atlantis)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/castro-chao-2021-development-long-early-modern-english/"
---
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# The Development of long in Early Modern English: Impersonal Verbs of Desire in Focus

**Authors:** Noelia Castro-Chao · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** [Atlantis 43](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/atlantis-revista-de-la-asociacion-espanola-de-estudios-anglo-norteamericanos/) ([Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 2021](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/atlantis-revista-de-la-asociacion-espanola-de-estudios-anglo-norteamericanos/2021/)) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Atlantis)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.07) · [PDF](https://www.atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/article/download/720/512) · [DOI 10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.07](https://doi.org/10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.07) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3177054668)

**Citations:** 2 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
This article tracks how the English verb *long* (from OE *langian*), a verb of Desire in Levin's (1993) classification, changed its argument structure during Early Modern English. Older English allowed it in impersonal clauses with no grammatical subject, where the desiring person (Experiencer) appeared in objective case. Later it settled into personal patterns, mainly prepositional ones such as *long for*. The study has three aims: to date when the impersonal use ended, to chart which personal patterns took its place, and to explain the rise of prepositional *long* within Construction Grammar. The author first reviews the senses and syntax recorded in the OED and MED. She then annotates 341 tokens of the verb drawn from a random prose subcorpus of EEBOCorp 1.0 covering 1500–1700. Her hypothesis is that prepositional *long* is a new form-meaning pairing, a metaphorical offshoot of the intransitive motion construction in which the desired thing is treated as a Goal. The supplied text leaves out the detailed results. The work fills a gap that Miura identified: corpus-based evidence on how individual impersonal verbs diverged after the construction collapsed.

## Key points
- Source corpus: EEBOCorp 1.0 (Petré 2013), about 525 million words. A random subset of 891 prose texts (19,934,284 words) was split into four fifty-year subperiods, S1 (1500–1549) to S4 (1650–1700), each close to 5 million words.
- The dataset contains 341 occurrences of the verb *long*. Each was annotated for clause type, subperiod and subject domain.
- To find spelling variants, the author took the OED's variant list and checked it against an AntConc word list built from the corpus.
- "Impersonal" is defined narrowly, following Möhlig-Falke: only clauses with no grammatical subject at all count. Clauses with a dummy *it*, like "it snows", are excluded.
- According to dictionaries and earlier studies, impersonal *long* is attested from OE up to roughly the first half of the 16th century. Only the OED sense branch for emotional or physical desire is analysed, using the semantic frame \<Desirer Desired>.

## Interesting ideas
- Sampling a manageable random subcorpus keeps manual homonym disambiguation feasible: here, verb *long* versus the adjective and adverb. Searching the whole corpus would produce far too many hits to check by hand.
- Spelling variants are collected by starting from a dictionary's list and keeping only the forms that actually occur in the corpus word list.
- The Experiencer role stays the same whether it appears as the subject or as an oblique objective pronoun, so role labels are kept separate from grammatical function.
- Desire verbs that take a preposition are read as metaphorical motion toward a Goal: you long *for* or *after* the thing desired.
- Drawing a clear line between subjectless clauses and clauses with a dummy *it* keeps the analytic categories clean.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Evaluation sets for ambiguous lemmas could be built by drawing a small stratified sample that a human can fully check, rather than spot-checking a huge automatic pull.
- **I2** (tokens): The same two-step check could feed a variant-to-lemma table for archaic or nonstandard spellings in older fables and tales, and it would keep invented forms out of the table.
- **I3** (frames): Patterns like "it pleases me" or "methinks" should map the obj/obl pronoun to Experiencer instead of assuming the subject is always the one who feels.
- **I4** (world): A desire relation could be stored as a directed relation toward a goal entity, reusing the motion-frame machinery, which would let readers infer what a character is trying to reach.
- **I5** (tree): The parser and UD conversion should mark expletive *it* as expl so that later stages never create a participant entity for it.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Universidade de Vigo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universidade-de-vigo/) — University, Vigo, Spain · 3 works · 4 citations

📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 1,373 works

## Cite

Cite as: Noelia Castro-Chao. 2021. The Development of long in Early Modern English: Impersonal Verbs of Desire in Focus. Atlantis 43.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{castrochao2021development,
  title = {{The Development of long in Early Modern English: Impersonal Verbs of Desire in Focus}},
  author = {Noelia Castro-Chao},
  booktitle = {Atlantis 43},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.07},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.07}
}
```

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46 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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41. Trousdale, Graeme. 2008. “Words and Constructions in Grammaticalization: The End of the English Impersonal Construction.” In Fitzmaurice and Minkova 2008, 301-26. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110211801.301)
42. Van der Gaaf, Willem. 1904. The Transition from the Impersonal to the Personal Construction in Middle English. Heidelberg: C. Winter. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Van+der+Gaaf%2C+Willem%2E+1904%2E+The+Transition+from+the+Impersonal+to+the+Personal+Construction+in+Middle+English%2E+Heidelberg%3A+C%2E+Winter%2E)
43. Visser, Fredericus. 1963. Syntactical Units with One Verb. Part 1, An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: E. J. Brill. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Visser%2C+Fredericus%2E+1963%2E+Syntactical+Units+with+One+Verb%2E+Part+1%2C+An+Historical+Syntax+of+the+English+Language%2E+Leiden%3A+E%2E+J%2E+Brill%2E)
44. Noelia Castro-Chao holds a BA in English Language and Literature and a PhD in English Linguistics (May 2020). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Noelia+Castro%2DChao+holds+a+BA+in+English+Language+and+Literature+and+a+PhD+in+English+Linguistics+%28May+2020%29%2E)
45. Until November 2019, she worked under funding from an FPU grant at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where she is currently a researcher at the unit for “Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization.” Her research interests include historical syntax and semantics, corpus linguistics and Construction Grammar. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Until+November+2019%2C+she+worked+under+funding+from+an+FPU+grant+at+the+University+of+Santiago+de+Compostela%2C+where+she+is+currently+a+researcher+at+the+unit+for+%E2%80%9CVariation%2C+Linguistic+Change+and+Gramm)
46. Revised version accepted 30 June 2020 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Revised+version+accepted+30+June+2020)

*Updated 24 October 2026*