While I have so far looked at semantic changes affecting the CPs under investigation, I now turn to the question of which types of syntactic changes these constructions go through. This change of perspective is driven by the question of whether semantic and syntactic changes run in parallel (see Scenario 1, Section 1.1), whether semantic changes proceed faster than syntactic ones in the sense of ‘form follows function’ (Scenario 2) or whether syntactic changes are primary and semantic changes set in later (Scenario 3).

The analyses presented in Section 8.2 show whether all those Type I-CPs which undergo semantic specialization/restriction (make answer to, make mention of, make use of, take leave of and take notice of; see Chapter 7) are part of the same scenario (either Scenario 1, 2 or 3) or whether they differ as to when semantic and syntactic changes set in. For a start, however, I place all CPs under investigation (no matter whether they undergo semantic specialization or not) on a scale that measures their degree of syntactic fixation in twentieth-century BrE (see Section 8.1).