On What With Constructions in Early Modern English

Abstract

This paper investigates what with constructions in Early Modern English by employing EEBO, which is a database collecting texts in the period. The investigation reveals that gerunds, especially verbal gerunds without lexical subjects, were selected as complements by what with as early as Early Modern English. It is argued that they began to be attested in its complement due to analogy with with PRO -ing, which was adjoined to main clauses in the same way as what with constructions.