The purpose of this study is to find out how the uses of alternating locative verbs have changed in terms of the order between Figure and Ground. As alternating verbs allow the locative alternation by switching the positions of the two arguments, this study focuses only on the argument order. In order to accomplish the purpose, three corpuses are adopted: COHA, COCA and GloWbE. The findings from the collected data reveal the increased or decreased frequency of their constructions, showing which construction has been more frequently used among English users over time. Talmy (2000a) argues that the Figure has syntactic precedence over the Ground in a basic construction. The changing tendency of their uses in alternating locative verbs supports Figure Precedence Principle proposed by Talmy.

• Wookyung Park(Kyungpook National University)
• Sungchool Im(Kyungpook National University)