“Recent Changes in the Use of the Verb Forbid”.

This paper explores the complementation patterns of the verb forbid in contemporary English. Based on the analysis of 2001 articles in two British newspapers, i.e. Daily Mail and The Independent, it demonstrates to what extent the –ing construction has been established with this verb in today’s English. The analysis shows that in the active voice at least, –ing forms are already much more frequent than to-infinitives in today’s English. In the passive voice, the –ing construction is still less frequent than the to-infinitival construction, but it has made a noticeable progress in both newspapers. This overall trend is interesting, since the –ing construction is still considered to be much less frequent than the to-infinitival construction in contemporary English, as far as descriptions in usage guides are concerned. The final part of the present paper refers to two constructions involving the verb forbid: the God forbid construction, which is still followed by that-clauses in Present-day English, and the adjectival use of forbidding. The proportions of these usages are currently on the increase, perhaps because the frequency of forbid itself is lower and lower these days. Hence, the increase of the relative frequency of these rather fixed uses.

Within the paper, I have made a fairly extended summary of Iyeiri (2016), which is written in Japanese but which investigates the uses of the verbs forbid and prohibit in BAWE (British Academic Written English).

Related publications

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2016. “BAWE (British Academic Written English) ni Miru Hobun no Doko: Ruiji no Imi wo Yusuru forbid to prohibit ni tuite no Shiteki Kosatsu” (Recent trends in the choice of verb complements in contemporary English: forbid and prohibit in BAWE, two verbs of implicit negation, considered from a historical perspective), in Kopasu kara Wakaru Gengo Henka, Hen-i to Gengo Riron (Language Change, Language Variation and Corpus-driven Linguistic Theories), ed. Yoshiki Ogawa, Akiko Nagano, and Akira Kikuchi, pp. 50-63. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2011. “Early Modern English Prose Selections: Directions in Historical Corpus Linguistics”. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 50: 133-199. (Downloadable PDF) — This paper includes an analysis of the complementation of forbid in the Early Modern English period.
• Yoko Iyeiri. 2010. Verbs of Implicit Negation and their Complements in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2003. “‘God forbid!’: A Historical Study of the Verb forbid in Different Versions of the English Bible”. Journal of English Linguistics 31: 149-62.