This study examines the diachronic increase in manner-of-speaking verbs taking direct speech complements (e.g. babble, whisper, shout) over the course of the Late Modern English period (cf. Fanego 2012). Drawing on the list of manner-of-speaking predicates provided by Levin (1993: 204-206), it focuses on tracking the pathway of change in the Corpus of Late Modern English texts, version 3.0 (Diller et al. 2011) from mainly intransitive predicates to direct, often referred to as ‘parenthetical’, reporting predicates.

The analysis will focus on two main questions. Firstly, it sets out to examine the degree to which the acquisition of a parenthetical direct reporting use involves the prior acquisition of other reporting patterns (e.g. cognate objects, reaction objects, indirectly reported clauses). This is important to establish the degree to which the attraction to the broader paradigm of reporting constructions (cf. Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970; Halliday & Hasan 1976: 132) facilitates the acquisition of the direct reporting pattern. Secondly, the study analyzes how the notion of ‘discursive secondariness’ (Boye & Harder 2012) is represented in the ‘focus/modifier’ distinction of models of event lexicalization (Erteshik-Shir 2007; Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998), and how this for the group of manner-of-speaking predicates relates to the notion of ‘manner/result complementarity’, i.e. the idea that a verb root cannot lexicalize ‘manner’ and ‘result state’ simultaneously, with a concomitant difference in argument realization.