Multiple sources in the copularization of become

Multiple sources in the copularization of become This paper shows how general productivity (see Barðdal 2009: 38) of the copular function of the verb become abruptly followed when a pre-copular stage had reached a threshold value about 1150, prior to which become only occurred with a spatial sense ‘arrive’, and with extensions of this sense. It is argued that this abrupt switch to general productivity rather than a gradual increase in productivity results from the fact that copular become is not the end result of a single diachronic lineage of constructions (i.e. a simple grammaticalization process, see Croft 2000: 32-37), but instead resulted from an interaction between lineages, as well as external influence, and from the coming together of all factors involved in the twelfth century. First, certain constructions in which become occurred gradually changed and interacted with each other. In a first stage, two constructions developed (through metaphor) out of become ‘arrive’. These are the constructions in (1), with a human subject and become meaning ‘attain’, and in (2), with an inanimate subject, a dative experiencer and become meaning ‘come upon’. (1) Heo becom to soþum wisdome. ‘She attained to true wisdom.’ (2) Seo þearlwisnis þæs heardan lifes him becwom. ‘The austerity of life came upon him.’ In a second stage a two-participant resultative construction, as in (3), developed as a syntactic blend of (1) and (2) (cf. De Smet 2009: 1747), which provided a formal template for a one-participant prepositional copular construction as in (4). (3) Andetnysse him becumeð to hæle ‘Confession results (for him) in salvation’ (4) Þii fader bi-com to one childe ‘Your father turned into a child.’ Another, unrelated construction provided a formal template for the adjectival copular construction. This is the depictive construction given in (5), in which an adjective serves as a secondary predicate, but become does not have a linking function (is not a copula). (5) He gesund becom to Æðelingege. ‘He arrived (and was) safe at Æðelinge.’ Second, the already existing copula weorðan ‘become’ (see Petré & Cuyckens 2009) provided a template of general productivity upon which the resultative construction could graft once it had become semantically sufficiently similar to a copular construction, and, once the copular stage was reached, the depictive construction also started to serve as a formal input for this analogical process, with as a result adjectival and nominal copular constructions. Finally, Old French probably also contributed (though only as a strengthening factor) to the success of copular become in precisely the twelfth century. From a balanced explanation taking into account all of these factors it is concluded that the sudden emergence of copular becuman is not as catastrophic as it at first seemed. References Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2009. Productivity: Evidence from case and argument structure in Icelandic (Constructional Approaches to Language 8). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change: an evolutionary approach. London: Longman. De Smet, Hendrik. 2009. Analysing reanalysis. Lingua 119: 1728-1755. Petré, Peter & Hubert Cuyckens. 2009. Constructional change in Old and Middle English Copular Constructions and its impact on the lexicon. Folia Lingistuica Historia 30: 311-365

Leuven English Old to New (LEON): Some ideas on a new corpus for longitudinal diachronic studies.

Despite the explosion of diachronic corpora of English in the last few decades, still not a single corpus exists that covers the entire documented history of English. Although its compilation is generally perceived as most attractive (Rissanen 2000: 13), corpus compilers do not seem to believe in its creation in the near future. This is regrettable, as many linguists dealing with longitudinal developments such as grammaticalization need to cover very long time spans, and are forced to combine several, not necessarily compatible, corpora (e.g. Hilpert 2008, van Linden 2009). Clearly, their results are less reliable than they might be if a single corpus existed (for example, Gries and Hilpert’s data (2008) show a major shift in the collocational profile of shall about 1710; however, this is precisely where one corpus they use ends and a second – rather different one – begins). So I tentatively started compiling a corpus myself, provisionally called LEON (Leuven English Old to New). The basic architecture of LEON comprises a 400,000 word corpus for each HC-period, and after 1710 for the periods 1710-1780, 1780-1850, 1850-1920, 1920-1990 and post-1990. Data available from 1250-1350, a less well represented period, serve as a template on which other subperiods are to be based to acquire best comparability of genre and region. To make up for the lack of some genres (letters, diaries) and social stratification, for each period after 1350 an additional, selfsufficient 600,000 words corpus is envisaged. While LEON is primarily conceived as a ‘meta-corpus’, mining existing corpora, some additions are envisaged too (e.g. the unedited Statutes Rwl. B.520, dated a1325). LEON does not aim at full comparability (which would be presumptuous), but wants to optimize the usefulness of concepts like ‘equal size of subperiods’ or ‘diachronic text prototype’ (HC). LEON might be, as compared to the present ‘big evil’, a ‘lesser evil’. References Gries, Stefan Th. and Martin Hilpert. The identification of stages in diachronic data: variability-based neighbour clustering. Corpora Vol. 3 (1): 59–81. Hilpert, Martin. 2008. Germanic future constructions A usage-based approach to language change. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Los, Bettelou. 2005. The rise of the to-infinitive. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rissanen, Matti & Merja Kytö. 1993. General introduction. In Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kytö & Minna Palander-Collin, eds. 1993. Early English in the computer age: Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1-17. Rissanen, Matti. 2000. The world of English historical corpora: From Cædmon to computer age. Journal of English Linguistics 28: 7-20. van Linden, An. 2009. Dynamic, deontic and evaluative adjectives and their clausal complement patterns: A synchronic-diachronic account. PhD dissertation, University of Leuven

Colette Moore, Quoting Speech in Early English (Studies in English Language). 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521199087. 230 pp

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Constructions and Environments: Copular, Passive, and Related Constructions in Old and Middle English

This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. Loss of the high-frequency verb weorðan ‘become’ is explained as a result of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. The merger of is ‘is’ and bið ‘shall be, is generally’ into a single suppletive verb is related to the development of a general analytic future shall be. Finally, the co-occurrence of multiple changes led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing copulas, from which they analogically adopted full productivity. In explaining each change, the study goes beyond the level of the verb and its complements, drawing attention to analogical networks and the importance of a verb’s embeddedness in clausal and textual environments. In its radically usage-based approach, treating syntax as emerging from changing frequencies, the study draws attention to some general principles of constructional change, including grammaticalization and lexicalization, by proposing novel parallelisms between linguistic and ecological evolution. Going beyond the view of language change as propagating only in social interaction, each individual’s mental grammar is described as a dynamic ecosystem with hierarchical environments (clausal niches, textual habitats). In this view, the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated changes, itself resulting from cognitive economy principles, is arguably more decisive in lexical change than is functional competition. http://global.oup.com/academic/product/constructions-and-environments-9780199373390 http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199373390.do http://books.google.be/books?id=LYGaAwAAQBAJnrpages: 311status: publishe

The functions of weorðan and its loss in the past tense in Old and Middle English

In this article, I relate the loss of weorðan in the past tense to the loss of an Old English grammatical subsystem that encouraged the expression of narrative by bounded sentence constructions. This type of construction represents a situation as reaching its goal or endpoint, and serves to mark progress in a narrative (e.g. then he walked over to the other side). Instead of this system, from Middle English onwards a mixed system emerges with differently structured bounded sentence constructions as well as, increasingly, unbounded sentence constructions – which structure events as open-ended, usually by means of a progressive form (e.g. he was walking). I show how weorðan in Old English was strongly associated with the Old English system of bounded sentence constructions – an association with boundedness is not surprising given its meaning of ‘(sudden) transition into another state’. In the thirteenth century this rigid Old English system started to break down, as primarily evidenced by the disappearance of the time adverbial þa and the loss of verb-second. Wearð, being strongly associated with the old way of structuring narrative, decreased too and eventually disappeared.Project number 3H05117

Analogy, frequency and system-dependent competition in grammaticalization. The show is (going) (about) to begin

The development of a prospective future function of be going to INF remains a dragon’s hoard for linguists to pillage. The common assumption is that a main verb go ‘go somewhere’ + purposive adjunct was reanalyzed into an auxiliary go + to + infinitival main verb, marking (immediate) future. Analogy has usually been assigned a secondary role in this process, and proposed analogues have been mostly convincingly dismissed as unlikely (e.g. Traugott’s 2012). This talk discusses the constructions (i) [be about to INF] and (ii) [go about to INF] and the major role they played in the grammaticalization of (iii) [going to INF]. My data come from an off-line corpus-conversion of the huge EEBO database of Early Modern English. (i) Þis luþere wummen weren ... A-boute to bringue luþer þou3t. ‘These evil women were... about to bring evil thought.’ (c1300) (ii) This false iuge gooth now faste aboute (‘busily about’) To hasten his delit. (c1390) The original sense of (ii) is spatial (‘go to several places in order to do something’), but from around 1530 a sense ‘try to’ and, more generally, prospective aspect appeared, as in (iib), which is also an early instance of participial go. (iib) They shall begyle your simple playnesse with feyned communicacion, not going about to wynne you vnto Christe. (1549) (iii) [going to INF], which unlike (iib), remained limited to cases of motion with a purpose until the end of the sixteenth century: As they were goynge to bringe hym there, ... cometh one Piers Venables (1439) Preliminary data suggest that prospective [go about to INF] was common enough – making its absence in the literature quite problematic – to model for [going to INF]. More importantly, while [going to INF] caught up with [go about to INF] only around 1700, it overtook [going about to INF] more than a century earlier, around the time when [be Ving] (the ‘progressive’) started to grammaticalize (Elsness 1994). At this point, only [go about to INF] had developed prospective aspect uses without motion. I argue that the grammaticalization of the progressive, though, led to production pressures: be going to was phonetically much lighter, and hence extended to going about to’s motionless uses through formal and semantic similarity. Only much later did going to outcompete go about to in general. My talk draws attention to various theoretical issues. First, the formal and functional similarity between be about to, go(ing) about to and going to, together with their frequency histories, corroborates the importance of analogy in the grammaticalization of going to, and may serve as a starting point for operationalizing the distinction between what Traugott (2012) calls ‘analogical thinking’ (which is everywhere) and ‘constructional analogization’. Second, the relation between the success of going to and the progressive construction illustrates how grammaticalization may be triggered by a shift elsewhere in the grammatical system (see e.g. Petré & De Smet 2012).status: publishe

On the distribution of OE wesan ‘be’ and weorðan ‘become’ and weorðan’s loss in ME

The present talk focuses on the replacement in the past tense of English weorðan ‘become’ by wesan ‘be’. I argue that a systematic aspectual distinction between them existed in Old English (OE), evidenced in the unique collocational strength between weorðan and certain time adverbials, as ap¬pears from an extensive corpus study. In Middle English (ME) these adverbials largely disappeared, and as a result, their collocate weorðan did too. This process, it is argued, is itself due to a broader develop¬ment of English into an unbounded language (Carroll & Lambert 2003; Trips & Fuß 2007). The distinction between wesan and weorðan in the passive is much debated. While early philologists like Frary (1929) argued that wesan was used for expressing result¬ing states or pluperfects, and weorðan for actional (or eventive) passives, Mitchell (1985: 324) stresses that wesan too can be used in eventive passives, and that the two were basically in free variation, as in (1). (1) (Annal 633) Her wearð Eadwine cing ofslagen, [...] (Annal 642) Her was Oswald ofslagen Norðhymbra cing. (c1107. ChronF: 633 & 642) “Here [= in this year] king Edwin was/got slain, [...] Here Oswald, king of Northumbria was/?got slain.” However, things are different in main clauses containing time adverbials. Significantly, weorðan frequently co-occurs with time adverbials meaning ‘then’ or ‘immediately’ (as in (2); 55% in late OE), whereas wesan does so only in 20% of its occurrences. (2) Heo hine freclice bat. Ða wearð heo sona fram deofle gegripen. (c1025. GD 1 [C]: 4.31.1) “She beat him heavily. Then she was/got suddenly taken by the devil.” This difference clearly suggests that a basic aspectual distinction between wesan and weorðan did exist in the OE passive, and that it is basically the same as the one observed in their copular uses. The systematic presence of time adverbials has further been linked to OE being a bounded lang-uage (Los 2008). A bounded language specifies ‘topic time’ (Klein 1994): the event is chopped up into consecutive temporal segments, linked by means of time adverbials – in (2) ‘then’ and ‘sud¬denly’. Their presence thus signals a change of state, which explains their association with weorðan. The replacement of weorðan by wesan, then, is hypothesized to be a consequence of the transition of English from a bounded to an unbounded language during early ME, which caused the time adverbials to largely disappear (Kemenade & Los 2006). Experimentally triggered differences between German (bounded) and English (unbounded) descriptions (see (3), from Carroll, von Stutterheim and Nuese 2004) substantiate this idea, as only the bounded language has a time adverbial. (3) a. Ein junger Mann surft auf hohen Wellen. Dann wird [!] er plötzlich von dem Brett geweht b. A young man is surfing. The wind is blowing him off the board. The transition thus caused the time adverbials, which reinforced the unique eventive meaning of weorðan, to largely disappear. This enabled the more frequent wesan to take over in the passive, and later on also in some copular uses, as in (4), where the differences between the OE and ME versions are in fact predicted by the hypothesis. The OE version adds the linker ða ‘then’, absent in the Latin, whereas the ME version renders facta est ‘is made’ by a simple was. (4) (OE). & hælend […] cweþ dohter, […] geleafa þin þec halne dyde & warð ða hal þæt wif of þære hwile. (MtGl (Ru) 9: 22) (ME). And Jhesus […] seide, Douytir, […] thi feith hath maad thee saaf. And the womman was hool fro that our. (a1425(c1395) WBible(2), Mt 9: 22) “And Jesus [...] said: ‘Daughter, […] your faith has made you safe. And the woman was cured from that hour on.” In general, my analysis insightfully links two hot topics in the literature on OE and ME, namely (i) the history of passive auxiliaries and copulas in general, and (ii) the function of time adverbials, by appealing to a theoretical distinction between bounded (OE) and unbounded (ME) systems. References Carroll, M. & Monique Lambert. 2003. Information Structure in narratives and the role of grammaticised knowledge: A study of adult French and German learners of English. Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition, edited by Christine Dimroth and Marianne Starren, 267-287. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Carroll, M., C. von Stutterheim & R. Nuese. 2004. The language and thought debate: A psycholinguistic approach. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Language Production, ed. by Thomas Pechmann and Christopher Habel. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 157. Frary, Louise G. 1929. Studies in the Syntax of the OE Passive, with Special Reference to the Use of ‘Wesan’ and ‘Weorðan’. Language Dissertation No. 5 (Linguistic Society. of America). Kemenade, Ans van & Bettelou Los. 2006. Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and Middle English. In: Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 224-248. Oxford: Blackwell. Klein, W. 1994. Time in Language. London: Routledge. Los, Bettelou. Syntax and Information Structure in Interaction: The Loss of Verb-Second in English and its Consequences. Paper presented at ISLE 1, Freiburg, 8 october. Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax, vol. I: Concord, the Parts of Speech and the Sentence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Trips, Carola & Eric Fuß. The syntax of temporal anaphora in early Germanic. Paper presented at CGSW Stuttgart, 9.6.2007. Corpora used Die Winteney-Version der Regula S. Benedicti Lateinische und Englisch mit Einleitung, Anmerkungen, Glossar und einem Facsimile zum erstenmale. 1888. St. Benedict, Arnold Schröer, ed. Halle: M. Niemeyer. (Electronic edition from the University of Michigan Library, url: http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AGV8488.0001.001 [06.07.2007]). HC: Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic Part (ICAME, version 2). 1999. Matti Rissanen et al. Helsinki: Department of English. The Paris psalter and the Meters of Boethius (The Anglo-Saxon poetic records, 5). 1961. George Ph. Krapp, ed. New York: Columbia University Press. PPCME2: Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 2nd edition. Anthony Kroch. Pennsylvania: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/ [06.07.2007]. The Middle English Genesis and Exodus (Lund Studies in English, 36). Olof Arngart, ed. 1968. Lund: Gleerup. YCOE: The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. 2003. Ann Taylor et al. York: Department of Language and Linguistic Science. YPC: York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry. 2001. Susan Pintzuk and Leendert Plug. York: Linguistics Department.status: publishe