Abstract
This paper innovatively charts the analogical influence of the modal auxiliaries on the regulation of periphrastic do in Early Modern English by means of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a flavour of connectionist models known for their applications in computer vision. CNNs can be harnessed to model the choice between competitors in a linguistic alternation by extracting not only the contexts a construction occurs in, but also the contexts it could have occurred in, but did not. Bearing on the idea that two forms are perceived as similar if they occur in similar contexts, the models provide us with pointers towards potential loci of analogical attraction that would be hard to retrieve otherwise. Our analysis reveals clear functional overlap between do and all modals, indicating not only that analogical pressure was highly likely, but even that affirmative declarative do functioned as a modal auxiliary itself throughout the late 16th century.
Funding source: Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds
Award Identifier / Grant number: FFB160227
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and to the Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum for the use of their HPC infrastructure.
Appendix A: Supplementary Material
Supplementary material to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2019-0080.
References
Budts, Sara & Peter Petré. 2020. Putting connections centre stage in diachronic Construction Grammar. In Lotte Sommerer & Elena Smirnova (eds.), Nodes and networks in diachronic construction grammar, 317–352. Amsterdam: John Benjanmins.10.1075/cal.27.09budSearch in Google Scholar
Baron, Alistair & Paul Rayson. 2008. VARD2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora. In Paper presented at the Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics. Birmingham, UK: Aston University.Search in Google Scholar
Behrens, Leila. 2005. Genericity from a cross-linguistic perspective. Linguistics 43(2). 275–344. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2005.43.2.275.Search in Google Scholar
Collobert, Ronan & Jason Weston. 2008. A unified architecture for natural language processing: Deep neural networks with multitask learning. In ICML25, Helsinki, Finland. 160–167.10.1145/1390156.1390177Search in Google Scholar
Dauphin, Yann N, Angela Fan, Michael Auli & David Grangier. 2017. Language modeling with gated convolutional networks. In ICML34, Sydney, Australia. 933–941.Search in Google Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik. 2009. Analysing reanalysis. Lingua 119. 1728–1755. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2009.03.001.Search in Google Scholar
Denison, David. 1993. English historical syntax: Verbal constructions. London & New York: Longman.Search in Google Scholar
Dubossarsky, Haim, Daphna Weinshall & Eitan Grossman. 2017. Outta control: Laws of semantic change and inherent biases in word representation models. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Copenhagen, Denmark. 1136–1145.10.18653/v1/D17-1118Search in Google Scholar
EEBO = Early English Books Online. eebo.chadwyck.com.Search in Google Scholar
Ellegård, Alvar. 1953. The auxiliary do. The establishment and regulation of its use in English. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Search in Google Scholar
Fertig, David L. 2013. Analogy and morphological change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.10.1515/9780748646234Search in Google Scholar
Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola & Heli Paulasto. 2008. English and Celtic in contact. New York: Routledge.10.4324/9780203895009Search in Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga. 2007. Morphosyntactic change. Functional and formal perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Garrett, Andrew. 1998. On the origin of auxiliary do. English Language and Linguistics 2. 283–330. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674300000897.Search in Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. & Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspectives on ‘alternations’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1). 97–129. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.1.06gri.Search in Google Scholar
Hamilton, William L, Jure Leskovec & Dan Jurafsky. 2016. Diachronic word embeddings reveal statistical laws of semantic change. In AMACL45, Berlin, Germany. 1489–1501.10.18653/v1/P16-1141Search in Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2016. Change in modal meanings: Another look at the shifting collocates of may. Constructions and Frames 8(1). 66–85. https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.8.1.05hil.Search in Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin & Florent Perek. 2015. Meaning change in a petri dish: Constructions, semantic vector spaces, and motion charts. Linguistics Vanguard 1(1). 339–350. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2015-0013.Search in Google Scholar
Hinton, Geoffrey E. & James A. Anderson. 1981. Parallel models of associative memory. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney. 1976. Some theoretical issues in the description of the English verb. Lingua 40. 331–383. https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(76)90084-x.Search in Google Scholar
Hudson, Richard. 1997. The rise of auxiliary do: Verb-non-raising or category-strengthening?. Transactions of the Philological Society 95(1). 41–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968x.00012.Search in Google Scholar
Itkonen, Esa. 2005. Analogy as structure and process: Approaches in linguistics, cognitive psychology and philosophy of science. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/hcp.14Search in Google Scholar
Kauhanen, Henri & George Walkden. 2017. Deriving the constant rate effect. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 36(2). 483–521. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-017-9380-1.Search in Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1. 199–244. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500000168.Search in Google Scholar
LeCun, Yann, Léon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio & Patrick Haffner. 1998. Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition. IEEE 86(11). 2278–2324. https://doi.org/10.1109/5.726791.Search in Google Scholar
Lightfoot, David. 1979. Cambridge studies in linguistics 23: Principles of diachronic syntax. New York: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Mikolov, Tomas, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado & Jeffrey Dean. 2013. Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. NIPS 26. 3111–3119.Search in Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 1991. Motivated archaism: The affirmative DO in Early Modern liturgical prose. In Dieter Kastovsky (Ed.), Historical English syntax, 303–320. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110863314.303Search in Google Scholar
Nurmi, Arja. 1996. Periphrastic do and be+ ing: Interconnected developments?. Language and Computers 15. 151–166.Search in Google Scholar
Nurmi, Arja. 2011. The rise and fall of periphrastic DO in Early Modern English, or “Howe the Scotts will declare themselv’s”. In Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, David Denison, Richard M. Hogg & C. B. McCully (Eds.), Generative theory and corpus studies: A dialogue from 10 ICEHL 31, 373–394.Search in Google Scholar
Nurmi, Arja. 2018. Periphrastic do in eighteenth-century correspondence. Emphasis on no social variation. In Terttu Nevalainen, Minna Palander-Collin & Tanja Säily (Eds.) Patterns of change in 18th-century English. A sociolinguistic approach. New York: John Benjamins. 117–135.10.1075/ahs.8.08nurSearch in Google Scholar
Petré, Peter, Lynn Anthonissen, Sara Budts, Enrique Manjavacas Arévalo, Emma-Louise Silva, William Standing & Odile Aurora Oscar Strik. 2019. Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA): Designing a large-scale corpus of individuals’ languages. ICAME Journal 43(1). 83–122. https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2019-0004.Search in Google Scholar
Plank, Frans. 1984. The modals story retold. Studies in Language 8. 305–364. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.8.3.02pla.Search in Google Scholar
Rehurek, Radim & Petr Sojka. 2010. Software framework for topic modelling with large corpora. LREC 2010.Search in Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti. 1991. Spoken language and the history of do-periphrasis. In Dieter Kastovsky (Ed.) Historical English syntax. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 321–342.10.1515/9783110863314.321Search in Google Scholar
Rumelhart, David & James C. McClelland. 1986a. Parallel distributed processing. Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. In Foundations, vol. I, Cambridge: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/5236.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Stein, Dieter. 1990. The semantics of syntactic change. Aspects of the evolution of do in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110846829Search in Google Scholar
Tahmasebi, Nina, Lars Borin & Adam Jatowt. (2018). Survey of computational approaches to diachronic conceptual change detection. Preprint at arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06278.Search in Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1972. A history of English syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Search in Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and constructional changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199679898.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Van der Auwera, Johan & Inge Genee. 2002. English do: On the convergence of languages and linguists. English Language and Linguistics 6(2). 283–307. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674302000242.Search in Google Scholar
Vanni, Laurent, Mélanie Ducoffe, Damon Mayaffre, Frédéric Precioso, Dominique Longrée, Veeresh Elango, Nazly Santos Buitrago, Juan Gonzales Huesca, Luis Galdo & Carlos Aguilar. 2018. Text Deconvolution Salience (TDS): A deep tool box for linguistic analysis. In AMACL56, Melbourne, Australia.10.18653/v1/P18-1051Search in Google Scholar
Vulanovic, Relja. 2005. The rise and fall of periphrastic do in affirmative declaratives: A grammar efficiency model. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 12(1). 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296170500055269.Search in Google Scholar
Warner, Anthony R. 1993. English auxiliaries. Structure and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511752995Search in Google Scholar
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
