Competition in antagonistic verb complementation

Verbal complementation is a popular topic for language historians and World Englishes scholars alike, not least because it provides a rich playing field for the study of variation and (ongoing) language change. The present paper adds to previous research a case study on three antagonistic verbs with a focus on phrasal complementation. Corpus evidence from the Late Modern period shows that antagonistic fight, oppose and protest do not unanimously drift towards a unified Argument Structure Construction. The study also provides preliminary evidence from a corpus of very recent news writing; these data show that the one case of twentieth-century divergence between British and American English is likely to disappear again, with popular newspapers in the UK adopting the ‘American’ preference for bare NP complementation. Probabilistic modelling of the AmE data suggests that PP complements are likely to survive on both sides of the Atlantic in a language-internally conditioned niche context.