Grammaticalization reconciled: functionalist and minimalist insights into the development of purpose subordinators in English

Nykiel, Jerzy

doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2013.10.010

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…just 2) as a result of semantic bleaching (or desemanticization; e.g. Heine & Kuteva 2007; see also Nykiel 2014: 7; Davidse et al 2017: 2.2). Instead, just so has developed a non-compositional meaning of condition or purpose.…”

Section: Just So As a Complex Subordinatormentioning

confidence: 99%

AJust SoStory: on the recent emergence of the purpose subordinatorjust so

Kaltenböck¹,

Wolde²

2022

English Language and Linguistics

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This article identifies just so as a newly emerging purpose subordinator. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Historical American English, it traces its development and steady increase in frequency from its first attestation in the mid nineteenth century to the present day. Just so is shown to represent a case of semantic specialization where the purpose meaning wins out over the conditional meaning, thus filling the niche of an informal purpose subordinator and providing an alternative to its multifunctional and semantically ambiguous competitors so that and so. With increasing grammaticalization the just so purpose subordinator also exhibits signs of intersubjectification, being coopted for syntactically independent, interpersonal uses (e.g. just so we're clear) and culminating in the emergence of a new discourse marker in the form of just so you know in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. To account for the emergence of purpose just so, a constructional network approach is adopted, which considers the network links to other purpose subordinators, notably so that and so.

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Section: Just So As a Complex Subordinatormentioning

confidence: 99%

AJust SoStory: on the recent emergence of the purpose subordinatorjust so

Kaltenböck¹,

Wolde²

2022

English Language and Linguistics

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“…As incipient grammaticalisation is a type of grammaticalisation, this study is also a study in grammaticalisation. Importantly, following my earlier research (see Nykiel 2014), I combine insights from the functionalist approaches to grammaticalisation (Section 4) and the generativist approaches to grammaticalisation (Section 3) with the aim of arriving at an exhaustive picture of the grammaticalisation of onmang þaet.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Onmang Þæt – Incipient Grammaticalisation in Old and Middle English

Nykiel

2018

Trans of the Philol Soc

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This paper examines the development and use of the temporal subordinator onmang þaet. The development of the subordinator is seen as a special case of grammaticalisation, i.e. incipient grammaticalisation. Onmang þaet arises through the incorporation of the prepositional phrase onmang + demonstrative into the subordinator structure and in this respect onmang þaet resembles the grammaticalisation of other OE subordinators. The grammaticalisation of onmang þaet is however arrested in early ME, as the paper shows using a generative approach. I interpret this turn in the grammaticalisation of the subordinator as indicative of incipient grammaticalisation and I further use this observation as an avenue to identifying other features concomitant with incipient grammaticalisation. What I suggest is that incipient grammaticalisation should be associated with low frequency, minimal erosion, lack of fusion, and, finally, specialisation. I tentatively argue that options reduced via specialisation, as is the case with onmang þaet, may be the ones that qualify as cases of incipient grammaticalisation. Importantly, what follows is that incipient grammaticalisation as discussed in this study is not to be taken as referring to the early stages of grammaticalisation as such but to the grammaticalisation of infrequent structures available for a longer period of time.

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In order that– a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence

Rudnicka

2021

Linguistics Vanguard

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This paper is an empirical case study of grammatical obsolescence in progress. The main variable of study is the English purpose subordinator in order that, which is shown to be steadily decreasing in its frequency of use, starting from the beginning of the twentieth century. This work applies a data-driven approach for the investigation and description of obsolescence, recently developed by Rudnicka, Karolina. 2019. The Statistics of obsolescence: Purpose subordinators in Late Modern English. NIHIN: New Ideas in Human Interaction: Studies. Freiburg: Rombach. The methodology combines philological analysis with statistical methods used on data acquired from mega-corpora. Moving from the description of possible symptoms of obsolescence to different causes for it, the paper aims at presenting a comprehensive account of the studied phenomenon. Interestingly, a very significant role in the decline of in order that can be ascribed to the so-called higher-order processes, understood as processes influencing the constructional level from above. Two kinds of higher-order processes are shown to play an important role, namely i) an externally-motivated higher-order process exemplified by the drastic socio-cultural changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ii) an internally-motivated higher-order process instantiated by the rise of the to-infinitive (rise of infinite clauses).

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Grammaticalization reconciled: functionalist and minimalist insights into the development of purpose subordinators in English

Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

AJust SoStory: on the recent emergence of the purpose subordinatorjust so

AJust SoStory: on the recent emergence of the purpose subordinatorjust so

Onmang Þæt – Incipient Grammaticalisation in Old and Middle English

In order that– a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence

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