Corpora and the Changing Society

This chapter seeks to establish if the Transitivity Hypothesis (Hopper & Thompson 1980) can explain the variation in the use of two reflexive strategies with the verb sit in Early Modern English (e.g. I sat me down/I sat myself down ) and the verb’s subsequent transitivization (e.g. he sat me down ). By studying data from large historical corpora, we will re-evaluate the results of earlier research and establish why sit continued to be used with the simple reflexive strategy (i.e. with objec