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The class of verbs of Desire, as defined in Levin (1993: 194–195), comprises a few verbs, such as hunger, long, lust and thirst, whose syntax and semantics have undergone important changes in the course of their histories. All four verbs are attested in earlier English as impersonal verbs, that is, verbs capable of occurring in constructions characterised by the lack of a subject marked for the nominative case (e.g. c1000, Þa cwæð he, me þyrst ‘Then he said, I am thirsty’, OED s.v. thirst, v.).
The impersonal construction decreased in frequency between 1400 and 1500 (Allen 1995; Möhlig-Falke 2012), with marginal instances recorded until about 1600. The loss of the impersonal construction brought about profound changes in the grammar of English in general and in the grammar of verbs of Desire in particular, whose development from impersonal to personal use seems to have been highly verb specific, showing a great amount of lexical variation, as suggested by prior research (e.g. Möhlig-Falke 2012: 19; AUTHOR 2019).
In this presentation, I explore the development of thirst (< OE þyrstan), based on a comprehensive survey of the OED and the MED and on corpus data retrieved from EEBOCorp 1.0 (1470s–1690s; 525 million words). The analysis of 304 examples has revealed that in the course of Early Modern English, a period comparatively neglected in previous research on impersonal verbs, four different personal patterns were employed as substitutes for impersonal constructions, namely patterns with prepositional complements (e.g. 1595, how can you indure to thirst after the destruction of so sweete a countrie), with clausal complements (e.g. 1544, We thirste intirely to heare the pure gospell frely & faithfully preached), with zero complements (e.g. 1542, If ony man thyrsteth, let him come to me & dryncke) and with NP complements (e.g. 1542, They … thyrsted innoce~t bloud). Out of these, the first three remain considerably frequent throughout the period, whereas NP complements tend to disappear, being largely superseded by prepositional complements.
The results shed light also on the specialisation of the pattern with prepositional complements to code the sense ‘to desire’, where the argument structure involves a Desirer and a Desired, and on the specialisation of the pattern with zero complements to code the sense ‘to feel thirst’, where the Feeler is the only lexically profiled participant. In this latter use, thirst pertains to the domain of Physical Sensation rather than Desire.
The hypothesis is put forward that the finding just described, as well as the obsolescence of NP complements, results from the interaction between the lexical semantics of verbs of Desire, which profile a Desired participant as the Endpoint of the Desirer’s direction of attention, and the semantics of patterns with prepositional complements, which can be interpreted as an extension of an Intransitive Motion construction taking an oblique Goal (e.g. PDE, The boy ran to the house). From this perspective within the Construction Grammar framework (Goldberg 1995, 2006), the pattern with a prepositional complement is interpreted as enabling the construal of the Desired as a metaphorical Goal, and the conceptualisation of the emotion of desire itself as a metaphorical inclination or movement in a certain direction.