Chapter 4 is devoted to the methodology applied in this book. For one, I motivate the choice of the twenty-four CPs investigated in this study and explain how they have been retrieved. Secondly, I ask how we can best operationalize the concepts of semantic scope and semantic specialization, which are relevant to test the first and the second hypotheses (Section 3.4). This presentation is followed by an introduction of the three different types of semantic specialization investigated in this study and an answer to the question of how they are operationalized. Here, I focus a) on the modifier slot (Section 4.3.1), b) on the determiner slot (Section 4.3.2) and c) on the wider assertive or non-assertive contexts that the CPs occur in. The chapter is concluded by an outline of the corpora in use, the time periods investigated and the statistical tests applied (Section 4.4).

In this chapter, I turn to Type I-CPs – that is, those CPs which have morphologically (and often semantically) related simple verbs that either show a strong increase in terms of their normalized frequencies or which have consistently very high frequencies of occurrence. I first test Hypothesis 1, stating that there is a correlation between the semantic scope and evolution of the CPs and that of their morphologically and semantically related simple verbs. The first analysis compares CPs with a semantic overlap to those without, asking whether both types confirm the hypothesis of a correlation between the semantic scope and evolution of the simple verb and that of the CP. Subsequently, I move on to explore which types of specialization apply to those CPs which have morphologically and semantically related CPs. I here look at changes in the modifier slot (Section 6.2), changes in the determiner slot (Section 6.3) and changes in the wider assertive and non-assertive contexts that these CPs occur in (Section 6.4). Finally, I ask whether the data analyzed allow us to make predictions as to which CPs specialize in which ways (Section 6.5).