Historical Changes in the Use of Prepositions of the ‘Fear’ Predicates

The purpose of this study is to examine and explain the historical changes of the selection of prepositions by the ‘fear’-predicates ‘afraid’, ‘fearful’, ‘scared’, ‘terrified’, and ‘frightened’. In Present Day English (PDE), these predicates take the preposition ‘of’ before a causative element of fear. The examination of the Early Modern English (EModE) corpus EEBO and the Late Modern English (LModE) corpus COHA has shown that these predicates changed differently. While ‘afraid’ and ‘fearful’ have shown no significant historical changes, ‘scared’, ‘terrified’, and ‘frightened’ changed from a ‘surprise’-predicate in EModE, which used ‘at’ rather than ‘of’, to a ‘fear’-predicate, and the frequency of ‘of’ has increased rapidly. Since ‘scared’, ‘terrified’, and ‘frightened’ are past participles, they can also use a ‘by’-phrase in passive constructions. However, this ‘by’-phrase decreases over time, due to a diachronic adjectivation of these predicates. This study also finds the increase of ‘about’ in all ‘fear’-predicates, for which it is argued that this is due to the democratization of language.