On the Historical Development of During

In the present paper, we bring to light some new facts regarding the preposition during. Our corpora investigation indicates that during is the most frequently used deverbal preposition, but its historical development has not been recognized accurately, including the fact that its prepositional usage is older than its predicative one. To address unsettled questions on the preposition\u27s development, we argue that the Unaccusative Hypothesis plays a significant role in the historical derivation of both the prepositional and the predicative usages of during. This, in turn, clarifies how the two usages derived, as well as why the former preceded the latter in the history of during