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

Abstract

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).